How to lean-out for rugby season

THE LEAN-OUT FORMULA

Amateur players, like our professional counterparts, can benefit from maintaining or even increasing size at the expense of body fat. That means getting leaner and stronger at the same time. If you’ve read up on periodization for rugby, you’ll understand that this is the phase usually known as ‘pre-season’. 

Depending on your scores in the fitness testing table above, you might need to either lean-out or bulk-up during pre-season. If you’re under-size and running 12s on a beep test, stop reading now. Go grab some whey protein and sleep more to get bigger.

If however you’ve killed the max bench and squat, but you can’t vertical jump for peanuts, keep reading and we’ll give you the formula to get lean for rugby season without spending 4 hours a day in the gym. The formula involves making small changes to your diet, training and sleep. 

About a dozen members of our product testing team in the US, Canada and Australia have adopted this lean-out formula during pre-season training. The result? Weight is largely maintained while body composition, strength and cardiovascular fitness improved significantly. To become part of the next testing group – email us on [email protected].

CHANGING YOUR DIET

Your primary energy source

We mentioned above that cutting out carbohydrates is one of the ways people usually go about getting lean for rugby season. And it usually fails. Not because the theory is wrong, but because the execution is lacking. For the majority of amateur athletes, carbohydrates are your #1 source of energy. This energy comes in the form of foods like fruit, pasta, rice, potatoes etc.

How your body processes carbohydrate into energy

Why do you want to eat fewer carbohydrates? Mainly because your body can’t store more than about 2 days worth of energy from carbs. If you consume more carbs than you can store, your liver turns these into fat for future conversion back into energy when needed. If you’re not doing enough exercise during those two days to burn up your intake, you’ll continue building up useless stores of fat. Unless you’re an ultra-marathoner in your space time, stores of fat are not a good thing.

Rugby players don’t need (many) carbohydrates during pre-season

During pre-season, when you’re trying to lean-out for rugby, you shouldn’t be using a huge amount of energy between training sessions. You’ll have rugby training twice a week, and probably 2-3 gym sessions during that time too. But none of these activities require thousands of excess calories from carbohydrates.

We’ve run several tests on caloric requirements of gym sessions using squats and deadlifts as our primary movements. The results are usually that you’ll burn anywhere from 400 to 800 calories during a session. But remember, if you weren’t exercising you’d be burning calories too. So realistically, your gym session has probably only helped you burn through 200-300 additional calories. If you go downing a 1000 calorie fruit-based smoothie after your session, you’re actually being counter-productive. More on caloric intake shortly.

Depending on your age and fitness level, you may need to eat some carbs prior to training. But don’t overdo it. A piece of fruit (banana, apple, orange) an hour before rugby training with a handful of Walnuts or Almonds is more than enough to get you through the session. If you combine this with drinking a pre-workout or nitric oxide booster while you’re exercising, even better.

Eat MORE fat

Sounds counter-intuitive doesn’t it? How could you possibly get leaner by eating more fat? For years we’ve been told to choose the low-fat option at the grocery store. But the latest nutrition science suggests that athletes can see significant performance and body-composition improvements by using a low-carb healthy fat (LCHF) diet.

Cyclists and triathletes were some of the first athletes to experiment with what’s known as a ‘ketogenic’ diet. A strict ketogenic diet is composed of almost 85% fat with the remainder being protein or vegetables and absolutely no carbohydrate from grains or fruit. Eating strict-keto is a really difficult thing to do. Its generally reserved for epileptic kids trying to stop seizures. But the general principles have been widely adopted by elite sporting programs around the world. In the past 4 years, virtually every international rugby squad has shifted their diet away from carbs. While they haven’t gone so far as adopt strict-keto, they’re definitely in the LCHF category.

The All Blacks diet and healthy fats

Until 2011, the All Blacks’ diet looked pretty conventional. Players were encouraged to eat mostly grains with breakfast and vegetables with lean protein for major meals. They ate lots of fruit too. And were made to load up on carbohydrates the day before a game. That’s all changed since their strength and conditioning coach, Nic Gill, began experimenting with LCHF principles in his own training as an elite endurance racer. At the 2015 RWC, the All Blacks ate snacks that were much more balanced with plenty of coconut oil, nut butters, fatty proteins and choice supplements.

It’s important to note that this isn’t completely Ketogenic. And on game-day, the team would incorporate more carbohydrate in order to fuel up for a match. For rugby players, both amateur and professional, eating strict-keto is unrealistic and could possibly have adverse performance effects due to the way your body uses energy during a rugby game. But eating LCHF should be your goal during pre-season if you want to lean-out.

Foods to avoid

This isn’t the hard part of LCHF, but we’ll address it anyway. The #1 diet change you need to make in order to lean-out for rugby season is to avoid sugar. All sugar. Every kind of sugar. Even the thought of sugar. Get rid of it, it’s done. As of right now, you no longer eat any of the following:

• ice-cream, sweets or candy
• soft-drink, soda or fruit juice
• pasta, rice or bread
• fruit (except for tomatoes and avocado)

This last point is the most difficult to get your head around. Conventional wisdom suggests we need fruits in our diet for a healthy balance of vitamins and minerals. In reality, the fruit we eat is largely turned into useless fat because we’re not exercising enough to burn through it. As of right now, you no longer eat fruit.

EDIT: we realize this goes against the advice that you should eat a banana (with Walnuts) an hour before training sessions. We want to make it clear though that the piece of fruit you have before training is a special short-term tool designed to give your body enough fuel to train on. For the most part though, cutting fruit out of your diet will help you transition to using fat for energy.

“As of right now, you no longer eat fruit.” really means “As of right now, you no longer eat fruit unless its right before a 2 hour training session when you know you’re virtually guaranteed to burn through 1,200 calories.” – sorry for an confusion on this. 

Eating LCHF is F*ing great!

Ok stop freaking out. No, you don’t get to have your coke or apple juice at lunch. BUT! You do get to eat a whole bunch of awesome foods that you have probably been avoiding for years. I’m talking Bacon, I’m talking Steak, I’m talking Chocolate! Eggs a plenty and as much heavy cream in your coffee as your stomach can handle. Do you own a deep fryer? Even better! Throw some coconut oil in there and get to cookin’.

Eating LCHF is not the end of the world for your taste buds. In fact, as your body adjusts, you’ll come to genuinely dislike sweet foods and crave fats. Here are just a few meals you can now feel free to gauge on:

• Breakfast: egg with bacon – 28 g egg, 11 g bacon, 37 g of 36% heavy whipping cream, 23 g butter
• Snack: peanut butter ball – 6 g peanut butter and 9 g butter.
• Lunch: tuna salad – 28 g tuna fish, 30 g mayonnaise, 10 g celery, 36 g of 36% heavy whipping cream, half an avocado and 15 g lettuce.
• Snack: keto yogurt – 18 g of 36% heavy whipping cream, 17 g sour cream, 4 g strawberries and artificial sweetener
• Dinner: cheeseburger (no bun) – 22 g minced (ground) beef, 10 g American cheese, 26 g butter, 38 g cream, 10 g lettuce, half an avocado and 11 g green beans
• Snack: keto custard – 25 g of 36% heavy whipping cream, 9 g egg and pure vanilla flavoring.

Our favorite recipe right now is this awesome concoction of Jalapeno Poppers wrapped in bacon. We add cream-cheese too, because… why not?

When to drink more water

One of the classic `mistakes we make with our diets is to think we’re hungry, when we’re actually thirsty. For 20-30 years, you’ve probably been making this mistake, eating a meal when in fact, all you need is a glass of water.

At the same time, It’s standard operating procedure to tell someone who wants to lose weight that they need to drink more water. But more important than how much water you drink, is actually WHEN you drink it. Some people recommend having 8 glasses of water a day as the optimum for fat loss. In our experience, this is both hard to maintain and frankly annoying. The better way to use water in your fat loss diet is to simply drink 1 glass of water before each meal you have.

That it! Nothing complex. No running to the bathroom all day and making people look at you funny. Just have 350-500ml of water before every meal. You’ll eat less and your brain will actually function better too.

Use a Beta Hydroxybutarate supplement

Many rugby players reading this article have probably tried a low-carb diet in the past. And if you’re like the majority who did, it failed pretty quickly. Why? Its almost certainly because you reduced your carbohydrate intake without increasing the amount of energy you were getting from good fats. This has been the case with almost every rugby player we’ve talked to. Without additional energy getting to your brain, you become a horrible person to be around. Luckily, we have the answer, in the form of Beta Hydroxybutarate.

Transitioning to a LCHF diet will take about 2 weeks. During that time, you may become a more difficult version of yourself. Without sugar, your brain will be so busy performing basic functions that it won’t have much time for empathy. This is generally a bad thing for human relationships. But the guys at Keto Sports have developed a ketone powder that can help eliminate this adjustment phase: KetoSports KetoCaNa.

Keto CaNa is a white powder that contains one of the two primary ketone bodies, beta hydroxybutarate. It looks just like a white pre-workout powder and is used pretty much the same way. We suggest taking it in the morning with your breakfast and sipping it in a liter of water while working out. If you’ve tried Keto CaNa or you decide to after reading this article, please leave us a comment and tell us about your experience with it. (we may try to stock a similar product on staging-rucksciencecom.kinsta.cloud if we have enough interest)