Rugby Coaching Drills Video Library

Bouncing - The key to contact skills

Encouraging players to improve their "Floor" skills is the key to improving contact skills such as tackling, rucking and competing for the ball. It might be simple but it is effective

Video Subtitles

So, I don't know how many of you heard the term bouncing skill. Let's make sure we land on the ball and bounce to our feet long place. Okay that yes so so it can be the tackle. It could be around the breakdown. Okay, but essentially it's it's two things it actually originated at a fitness. So going back 15 years you play a game for touch condition touch a condition gain, and when you made that up for the rest of the team had to do a press up so come back and do a press up. So the Press up was then, you know tough work and if they were doing 1520 press-ups every five minutes, then that's pretty good pretty hard stuff. But then what's happening was that if you take the Tower of Power a lot of it is about your body position around the floor. So tackling breakdown work 90% of it is there or below on the floor. So what people do is hitting the floor gets you in a good body position get up. So bounce back up. Quickly, you're in a very good body position. What we tend to do is we now use people hitting the floor and getting back up again the more they hit the floor and get up the more they're actually practicing good body position. So the bouncing in make a tackle bounce up hit a bag bounce up make a touch do it down and up bounce back up again. You've been touched. So if I was carrying the ball I'm so rather than you know, a lot of games is one second touch you touch me. I got a second to upload. What we'll do is you touch me I have to hit the deck and bounce back up its so what's going to happen is Jamie's going to bounce get up driving to the man. Okay, you're the man the blue The Defenders going to give some resistance. Okay, you're then going to Long place. You're then going to come over crab over. And you'll become the scrum-half of the attacking side. It's not only hard work physically. It's actually conditioning my body to being used to getting on the floor and bouncing back up again and defensive defensive. If you get touched to your point you go down your bone saw before you move forward and then you present the ball, right? And the meantime The Defenders who touch then have to get back five phones. Don't bounce back up. Yes. So what you're trying what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to replicate without the physical contest that in a game every time you make a tackle or get tackled. You've got to get back off the floor again, and normally people are asking you to get back off the floor again in a contact environment and make a difference get across the game line Jackal for the ball. What's called the race for space with the breakdown if you dominate the space at the breakdown generally win the window. Section so it's about that race for space and that's all about how quickly you hit the deck and get back up again guys race for space. Let's go. Let's go down enough to rest. No no down UPS Red Bull Red Bull stay on Danny go to down go bread bowl. So the Tower of Power is very much saying okay Four Lads, you know, let's get into these positions, but what you can do the more they play games and you then condition them to hit the deck get back up again. When you then ask them to do specific exercises and practices around the Tower of Power. They're actually more used to it and it does strengthen them up if you've got to do a hundred press-ups. In every Tuesday night and every Thursday night, you know after six months you're going to be pretty strong and these boys don't know you doing see the game so I don't have kids and and some of them don't want to go down to the ground because they're getting muddy and dirty. So that's so actually this this is what's the one thing I was going to talk about how many sports how many sport involve getting up off the floor hitting the ground Leslie football many times on the floor for what I would say is because of that reason, you know, the slide tackle has actually gone out the game. So the point is there's very few students outside of some Judo and wrestling outside of that very few Sports. So boring children grow up nearly all their Sports these days on the floor which is why they're uncomfortable being on the floor and actually so wrestling games getting them comfortable hitting the floor rolling. So we've seen that sardine rolling sardines, you know, getting them having some fun around the on the floor gives them the confidence melting I would do when we come onto the tackle bit and very shortly was actually you regress before the tackle so that they're comfortable on the floor.