Having spent several months pacing up and down the admittedly limited floor space in my modest London flat like an animal with zoochosis, the end of COVID lockdowns meant the return of 2 for 1 espresso martinis, Hinge matches (again: limited) where you could actually meet up with the other person and, of course, the chance to run into other human beings as hard and fast as possible.
While it may sound incomprehensible and even neanderthal to many, the fact that the thing I was looking forward to the most was dropping my shoulder into someone running at me with an oval shaped ball will no doubt resonate with anyone who’s played contact and collision sports like rugby league, union or football.
As there were 20-30 other lads chomping at the bit to do the same, my local team where I was player-coaching hastily arranged a match just one week after lockdown ended. Without going into the details (which would quickly become a whole other article), I came out of the initial training session and the match that followed with complex neurological symptoms which upended my entire life. Just as the monotony and loneliness of lockdown ended, dizziness and vertigo, headaches, nausea and unbearable fatigue became a new daily reality. Discarding the British stiff upper lip for just a moment, in short, it was (and has been), the worst and hardest experience of my life.
In the long term, after months of sitting on my arse under orders of Her Majesty’s Government, the truth is that neither my body nor my nervous system were ready for the completely alien act of running into people. In the immediate term, as player-coach I had rushed my own preparation because I was so distracted by the preparation of others’. This failure to prepare in both the short and long term sense undoubtedly contributed to the constellation of injuries and symptoms which still affect me to this day.
While this experience has not dampened my love and appreciation for contact and collision sports, nor their physical and, dare I say, even aggressive edge, it has made me acutely aware of the need to properly prepare human bodies for the quite insane demands that are placed on them in these sporting contexts. This was part of the rationale for founding Tackle University: emphatically not a safety project, but a small coaching team who are well versed in and celebrate the physical aspects of the games we love, even despite my own challenges.
As I write, I am in the thick of pre-season in my other role as Head Coach of Sporting Olympique Avignon XIII, who play in the top division of domestic French rugby league. I am fortunate and lucky enough to have an aggressive group of players who love and go after the collisions on gameday, but at times this has meant protecting them from themselves in practice and throughout the pre-season.
In my view, preparing human beings for contact and helping them to avoid what happened to me does not mean wrapping them in cotton wool. In fact for us, contact is regular and demanding. Not only is it important for the identity we are trying to build as a team, but I firmly believe - and think the evidence supports this - that contact, done right, can be a protective factor against injury and even neurological insult (whether concussion, chronic whiplash or nervous system injury - such as to the vestibular system or other important nerves).
For example, one January 2025 study found that participation in contact sports was associated with a lower likelihood of post-concussion syndrome type symptoms (prolonged symptoms which continued for more than 29 days) than among non-contact athletes. This suggests there is some kind of preconditioning effect present among contact athletes. And, far from always being an actual injury to the brain, prolonged post-concussive symptoms often stems from things like autonomic nervous system dysfunction, cervical spine dysstructure, or vestibular system impairment - again suggesting that adequately preparing the nervous system and the structures around the cervical spine (including the ligaments and tendons, not just the muscles), can be beneficial to outcomes after concussion - some of which will always be inevitable in these sports in their current form.
(Of course, the long term effects of participation in contact and collisions later in life are beyond the scope of said paper, but as far as I can see evidence is certainly more mixed and inconclusive than much of the discourse suggests.)
Back to our preparation and pre-season. Just like sprinting, with which the strength coaches reading this will be well versed, a little bit of the poison can provide the antidote. And just like sprinting, the last thing we want is the first time players are exposed to proper, competitive contact and collisions to be our first game of the season. So we must expose them to it in practice.
Our players are exposed to some level of contact in almost every training session we conduct. Now, contact every session does not mean we are doing full speed, body on body collisions every session. It is heavily modulated through the week, and perhaps most pertinently, on our session planning we make a distinction between contact and collisions, and we give each
scores relating to the volume and intensity of each. Intensity is an admittedly imperfect term, as other factors come into play, such as distance/separation, or whether we’re using a training aid like a tackle shield or not. A tackle made at 100% intensity by a player against a player using a shield is very different to the bone on bone of just carrying a ball.
We also take into account a third variable: chaos/unpredictability. It is one thing for a player to make a 1v1 tackle within the confines of a closed drill, while it is quite another to have to account for multiple reads and options coming at you at full speed. A crude and simple example of how this might look on the planning is below:
While contact is regular, to the present we usually only perform one session which is on the high end of volume and intensity in terms of collisions. So another session from the one outlined in the table above, might be low to zero on the collisions spectrum, but moderate to high on the contact rating.
This is because collisions have an entirely different cost on the body and nervous system and they take time to recover from. By virtue of the rules and incentives of our game of rugby league, in which control and wrestle of the tackled player after the collision is much more prevalent than in either rugby union or football, a session with a high collision score by virtue carries a high contact score as well, so we need to take this into consideration in planning the rest of the week’s preparation.
All that said, even on a high collision day, we take our time to work up to collisions in practice. Over several weeks we implemented a ton of contact and processes beforehand: this included awareness of hooks and levers to better control opponents after initial contact, proprioception such as rolls, crawls and learning how to break fall, as well as simply getting a bit of competitive wrestling in to build up the engine for contact.
As I will say until I’m blue in the face: in the game it’s not the running demands that get you, it’s the repeatedly trying to control and takedown a human being doing everything not to be controlled that will. For this reason I believe that some degree of wrestling, grappling and combative partner drills with no impact can be done regularly, and for which there is simply no substitute when it comes to conditioning for contact sports.
When we started introducing impacts, we took our time getting the last step before impact and posture dialled in, at the same time putting the nervous system on notice that collisions with other human bodies were on the horizon. As we increased distance and separation between opponents we lent on training aids like tackle shields, but as the weeks progressed those elements reduced or became part of the in-session prep for contact, and the body on body impacts with greater distances and speeds involved have increased. In this sense, there is preparation for collisions happening in the short (within the session), medium and long term (over the course of several weeks or months).
Now, as I write we are peaking into round 1 of the season. We have had sessions where the intensity and collisions are as high as we can possibly replicate outside of match conditions (in my view it is impossible to fully reproduce the intensity and contact of competitive matches, but we have to try and get as close as we can at least once or twice in pre-season).
In the week before game 1, we will likely back off and reduce the volume, but we can still include some shorter bouts where the intensity is high. I also happen to think contact and collisions 24 hours out from competition is generally fine, even useful. It can be technical and slowed down, or it can involve hitting the shields a few times hard, fulfilling much the same purpose as a weight room ‘primer’ session.
Any pre-season is a tightrope walk between a myriad of competing concerns and qualities we need to develop, physically, mentally, tactically and culturally within the team. I won’t know if I’ve got the balance right until we’re in the thick of the season, but I believe that the general drift of this approach is the right way to go, rather than the misguided but common mistakes of throwing bodies into hard contact and collisions on day one without adequate prep, or avoiding it altogether or only using tackle bags and shields in the hopes of eliminating injury risk.
Yes we are doing all this to perform at our best but also because sometimes, as I do my best to fight off a wave of vertigo in order to continue coaching my session without the players noticing, I get a very acute, personal reminder of the crucial necessity of getting this balance right.
