The sport of rugby certainly isn’t for the faint of heart, and not just because it involves collision, combat and contact. Nick Lumley, Head of Performance for the New South Wales Waratahs, says it’s more than that – it’s confrontational.
Between the intensity, quick pace and physicality, confronting the heat on top of it all becomes that much tougher. The Waratahs use strategies that enable them to stay on top of hydration before, during and after hot games...
Being at the right size, weight and body composition is a big part of the sport, so a player’s hydration status (and fueling strategy) has a significant impact. As we see in the scientific literature, anything over a 2-4% loss of body weight from fluids can mean a level of dehydration that could negatively affect performance.
“If a player is habitually losing weight after a game and not regaining it, that’s the kind of picture which over the course of a season will cause the player to lose substantial amounts of weight through a playing season.”
While some level of dehydration is bound to happen, bouncing back before the next game (or practice) is crucial. This becomes more of a concern for heavy sweaters, hot environments and those not used to the heat.
Acclimatisation
Although Nick currently works with the 'Tahs in Australia, he used to coach in the UK, which meant very different weather conditions. It’d be easy to think training in the Aussie sun would be tougher on the players, but in a way, it’s easier, as they’re already used to the hot climate.
“In the UK, we’d be training and living in Scotland, which would be pretty cold in October, November and December. It’s regularly sub-zero that time of year in Scotland, but then we could play in Dubai at the end of November and it would be mid-30°C (86°F) and quite humid.”
They’d have to take into account sweat rates, heat regulation, heat shock and how the body can react to heat stress, especially when the environment switches quickly for a game somewhere else. To combat this, Nick notes they had to proactively try to acclimatise the players.
Compare this to the Waratahs, where they live in a climate of 10°C (50°F) in the morning, and afternoons in over 30°C (86°F), day in and day out. Subsequently, heat acclimatisation interventions are much less of an issue.
Not to mention a lesser known perk of playing in Australia… the changing rooms.
“You’ve usually got an air conditioned changing room here, which you don’t always get in Europe, which helps. You go inside and sit in there, which naturally does the job of ice cold beanies and things like that.”
Heat training
Compared to people who live in colder climates, Nick notes that those who live in the heat will have increased plasma volume, which allows them to sweat more and better regulate their body temperature. To accommodate budget needs, he says the UK players were regular sauna users.
The guys would hop in with the aim of getting as uncomfortable as possible and staying as long as they could. This would create an intense enough heat stress, and they positioned the sessions particularly before days off to allow for recovery time.
Directly after the sauna, the goal was to let the body cool itself in its own way, instead of trying to immediately bring the temperature down. The reasoning is to increase plasma volume with the heat and improve the players’ ability to tolerate heat and regulate their own body temperature versus relying on external cooling mechanisms.
Typically, the Waratahs don’t sign players mid-season, so they have plenty of time for out-of-town players to get used to living in the warm climate. However, if they did have someone coming in soon before a game and they’d previously lived in cooler weather, Nick noted they would be quite aggressive with heat acclimation, using some of those strategies he used in the UK.
Hydration: Before, during and after
One of the key things Nick explained is how body temperature would stay elevated on days with back-to-back games.
“We found that whilst we’d ice bath and cool and sit in air conditioned rooms between games, the temperature never returned to what it was at the start of the day. And at each game, it just started higher and finished higher than the one before.
“So the biggest take home we found in our practice was that anything we can do during games and during exercise to hold off that increase in body temperature the better.”
This even includes sticking woolly hats in buckets of ice cold water and placing them over the players’ heads. Or, a less Instagram-worthy aesthetic, such as a gadget that creates a vacuum over the wrist and essentially freezes the blood, causing high blood flow to the palm of the hand.
From a hydration standpoint, the Waratahs are big on preloading with strong electrolytes before sessions.
Preloading
Each player gets a bottle with PH 1500 electrolytes an hour and a half before the game to make sure they’re going onto the field hydrated. While this is a blanket approach for the entire team beforehand, they each have their own individualised strategy for during the game.
“For the higher sweaters, particularly the ones who are also high in sweat sodium, we provide a top up during training sessions and games. On a match day, you get the individual lockers at half-time where they all sit, so we give them individualised bottles.”
During matches
This half-time drink is also chilled and includes carbohydrates to ensure they’re refuelling, cooling and rehydrating before going out again. Nick estimates that each player gets around 1.5 litres of fluid during a game, though they’ll also be sipping on their own beverages.
Recovery
Nick says “recover, repair, rehydrate and refuel” are the top priorities after a game. In addition to another bottle of water, the players are also given a protein shake, as they’re usually less likely to eat post game due to the heat stress. They also head straight to an ice bath to help cool the body temperature down as soon as possible.
“Because we know the playing minutes they’ve played, we can assume they’ve burned plenty of calories, depleted muscle glycogen and sweated a fair amount. So we just have a strategy to recover, repair, rehydrate and refuel them, which we apply for everyone.”
As he explains, especially for a heavy sweater in the context of an intense sport, how do you stop them from dehydrating? Maybe you can prevent the extreme heat stress and ensure they’re starting fueled and hydrated, but ultimately, the players will encounter some level of dehydration and depletion.
“What you can do is make sure they recover appropriately so it doesn’t become a cumulative effect.”
A big part of this is ensuring they’re regaining the weight they lost due to the game. The conversations they have around weight management are strategic, encouraging the players to see it as nothing more than a data point instead of letting it become a fixation and an increased risk of disordered eating.
Being proactive with healthy body image education is part of the overall strategy, as well, plus teaching them about the effects of underfueling on athletic performance.
Their Monday morning weigh-in after a weekend of games is indicative of recovery, reflecting if they’ve accounted for dehydration and muscle glycogen depletion. Between those two elements, some guys can easily lose three kilos – or more – from a match day.
“We’ll follow up [the Monday weigh-ins] with conversations with players and say that you’ve still not regained your body weight three or two days post game now. So, something in the last 48 hours hasn’t quite gone the way we want it to. You’ve either under hydrated, you’ve under eaten, you’ve not eaten the right foods.”
Tackling buy in
On the flip side, when they do tackle recovery well, it goes a long way to muscle mass gaining and retention, as well as avoiding injuries.
Because of this, Nick says it isn’t too difficult to get the players on board with strategic hydration and nutrition practices.
“They all want to be successful. They all want to play at the highest possible level. And so there’s your link there. There is a natural reason to buy into an S&C program, body composition, recovery and getting your body right because ultimately they all want to be good at what they do.”
Because of the physicality of the sport, including the running demands and intensity of effort, players just can’t keep up for the whole time if they’re not in the right shape. Being a pro rugby player means being a pro at fueling, hydrating and recovering, too.
