'We have a responsibility to make the game safe': Guidelines to limit contact in rugby training

Irish rugby may be ahead of the curve in many respects in this area due to its centralised structure

It was at Leinster more than a decade ago that Joe Schmidt began to transform player welfare practices in Irish rugby and yesterday he helped launch a series of World Rugby guidelines that are intended to spread those principles around the globe.

World Rugby, the sport’s governing body, has published new guidelines in conjunction with International Rugby Players, that recommend limiting the levels of contact training professional teams should conduct during a week.

That Ireland’s former head coach Schmidt is one of the leading lights in this initiative in his role as World Rugby director of rugby and high performance is no coincidence any more than Leinster’s senior coach Stuart Lancaster was involved in reviewing the study and advising the development of the guidelines. Nor that Ireland international and IRP’s head of strategic projects and research, Sene Naoupu, was front and centre when the guidelines were released yesterday.

Irish rugby may be ahead of the curve in many respects in this area due to its centralised structure that means all its professional and international players come under the auspices of the IRFU, the national governing body, and Leinster is among the clubs now using instrumented mouthguards and video analysis to monitor the effectiveness of the new guidelines.

Leinster’s participation alongside, amongst others, Clermont Auvergne and Benetton, was yesterday described as pushing an open door. Lancaster, head coach Leo Cullen and the province’s players have often in recent years talked about the former England boss’s Tuesday training sessions, high in terms of intensity and velocity but very much low on impact.

“We have a responsibility to make the game as safe as possible for all our players,” Lancaster said of the guidelines, which were also developed following feedback from around 600 players via IRP.

“For coaches, optimising training plays a significant role in achieving that objective. It is important that we do not overdo contact load across the week in order that players are fresh, injury-free, and ready for match days. These guidelines provide a practical and impactful approach to this central area of player preparation and management.”

World Rugby’s latest efforts to improve player welfare recommend a maximum of 15 minutes of full contact training per week across a maximum of two days per week, a maximum of 40 minutes per week of controlled contact training, and a maximum of 30 minutes’ set-piece training per week with zero full contact training on Mondays and Fridays to enable recovery and preparation either side of matchdays.

Their guidelines were published on the same day that England’s Rugby World Cup winner Steve Thompson became the first sportsman to pledge his brain to the Concussion Legacy Project. Thompson, 43, was diagnosed with early onset dementia last year and has said he cannot remember playing in the 2003 World Cup final win over Australia.

He is one of several former professional rugby players to have revealed the same or similar diagnoses while launching a lawsuit against World Rugby and several national rugby unions for negligence as a result. Part of their efforts to shed light on the issue was to call for limits to be imposed around the
levels of contact allowed in training.

IRP’s global study sample of 600 players from across 18 elite men’s and women’s competitions was combined with a comprehensive review of the latest injury data.

The player feedback revealed varying training patterns across competitions with an average of 21 minutes per week of full contact training and an average total contact load of 118 minutes per week.

World Rugby’s intent is that the guidelines will lead to a more measured and consistent approach to training, thus helping to manage the contact load for players and thereby avoiding an elevated injury risk in training.

The same principles have been guiding Irish rugby for some years as they have in New Zealand, with the IRFU’s player welfare programme guided by a long-term view of its professionals’ ability to enjoy lengthy careers. There is self interest at play, of course, given the limited number of players available to the Ireland and provincial head coaches and the need to keep them fit, healthy, and available for selection over many seasons.

And the system has been tweaked regularly over those years with the appointment of IRFU data scientist Dr Andy Whale taking the protocols to another level, bringing together different data sets from areas such as medical, GPS, training durations, and so on into a single platform providing a monitorable dashboard for each player and squad.

It has come a long way since Schmidt arrived at Leinster in 2010 and yesterday as one of the prime movers behind these new World Rugby guidelines, the New Zealander said: “Training has increasingly played an important role in injury-prevention as well as performance. While there is a lot less full contact training than many people might imagine, it is our hope that having a central set of guidelines will further inform players and coaches of key considerations for any contact that is done during training.

“These new guidelines, developed by leading experts and supported by the game, are by necessity a work in progress and will be monitored and further researched to understand the positive impact on player welfare. We are encouraged by the response that we have received so far.

“We recognise that community level rugby can be an almost entirely different sport in terms of fitness levels, resources and how players can be expected to train, but the guidelines can be applied at many levels, especially the planning, purpose and monitoring of any contact in training.”