Training in Isolation - John Mitchell, Head of Athletic Performance, Plus500 Brumbies
Getting Started
The most important thing to consider for your training in isolation is to develop a daily routine. In this way you can schedule your daily activity to ensure you get it done.
Often the hardest part of the day is getting out of bed. Set your alarm get out of bed, make your bed.
This serves 2 purposes:
1. Stops you getting back in and
2. You have already achieved something in your day.
This then becomes the perfect time to exercise, it will help kick start your metabolism and your energy for the day.
Choose an activity, you only need to do 30 mins to start with and you are away.
This way you’ll be hungry for breakfast and ready to start your working/schooling day in isolation.What does daily activity look like?This will be different for everybody and will depend on what you may or may not have been doing prior to isolation.
Pick an activity you enjoy. This makes sense as you don’t want to be doing something you don’t like. If you don’t know what you like, just try something, you’ll work out pretty quickly whether you like it or not.
Here are a few easy choices; walking, walking the dog, jogging, bike riding, body weight exercises, gym-based resistance exercises (if you are lucky enough to have this equipment at home).
Aim to start at 30 minutes then work your way up.
Making improvements
There are a number of ways you can go about improving the exercise you choose.
Firstly, you can increase the volume, by this I mean increase how much you do e.g. increase a 30 minute walk to 35 minutes.
Secondly, you can increase the intensity so now you complete your 30 minute walk in 29 minutes, so you actually travel faster.
Lastly, the frequency at which you exercise can also be manipulated.
Start out doing it three times per week, lets say Monday/Wednesday/Friday.
Then change to Monday/Tuesday/Thursday/Friday.
Then add a Saturday or Sunday.
Pretty soon you’ll be doing this daily as part of your routine.
Recovery
Initially it is important to give your body time to recover and adapt to your new exercise regime.
Stretching and doing mobility exercises will help your body prepare for your next activity bout.
At first you may choose to do this on a Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday.
This is an activity you can start of doing for 15 minutes and build up to 30 minutes or more.
Brumbies schedule
It has been really important for the Plus500 Brumbies Players to maintain a schedule to ensure when we return to training they are physically ready for the rigours of training and then games.
Currently this is an example of their isolation training week:
Monday – Speed running activities and lower body strength.
Tuesday – Running conditioning and upper body strength.
Wednesday – Body weight circuits and flexibility
Thursday - Speed running activities and Full body Power activities
Friday - Running conditioning and upper body strength
Saturday – Mountain run challenge and flexibility
Sunday – Rest
Here is an example of an easy body weight circuit challenge you can do at home.
Complete the following;
100 Push Ups
100 Sit Ups
100 Squats
Do as many push ups as you can, then do as many sit ups as you can, then do as many squats as you can.
Keep rotating through these exercises until you have completed 100 reps of each.
A good time for completion is less than 7 minutes.
