RUNNING INTO A BRICK WALL! BY JOHN PLUMMER Great Britain forward Jamie Peacock explains why rugby league’s Tri-Nations is the hardest competition in sport and how he prepares for the challenge. The roughest, toughest sporting event of the year culminates on November 26 when the final of the Tri-Nations takes place in Leeds. • The Tri-Nations brings together the three superpowers in rugby league. Australia are favourites, Britain want revenge for their mauling in last year’s final while New Zealand are desperate to improve on their winless 2004 campaign. • The champions may not be known yet but for the players taking part, one thing is certain: pain. In top class rugby league, you are never more than a few seconds away from seeing some poor sucker flattened by an opponent looking like a crazed bear. Even a seasoned hard man like Great Britain forward Jamie Peacock, 27, who stands 6’-5” tall and weighs a solid 16 stone, winces at the prospect of what’s in store. “I’m sore for two or three days after big matches,” he says. “Even getting out of bed is a problem. You can do as much flush-out training as you like to recover afterwards but it still hurts.” He reckons no other sport matches his in the pain stakes. “I’d say rugby league is the toughest team game partly because of the physical demands and partly because of the fact that you have to produce the goods week in, week out,” he says. “We need a range of fitness from aerobic to anaerobic. Other sports such as rowing and the marathon test you in the same way but we have the impact on top of it. “A lot of the players have huge respect for boxers and UFC fighters but they only have to perform once every couple of months. We have to put our bodies on the line week after week. “One of the hardest things to get across is the speed of the game. If you play in the middle of the pitch or the forwards you are constantly gasping for air and having to push yourself beyond what your body wants to do.” No amount of training protects the players from a pummelling, but the hours they spend in the gym at least help them get through in one piece. Peacock has four heavy and one light lifting sessions a week to enable him to make and take the hits. “Weight training is a massive thing, particularly for us forwards,” he says. “I don’t ever want to miss a tackle or not make a break because of a lack of fitness or strength. My philosophy is ‘even if you are more skillful than me there will come a time when you tire and I will take advantage of that’.” Weight training has helped Peacock fulfil his potential in a game he started at the age of four. It may be difficult to believe looking at him today but Peacock is actually a hardgainer and naturally small, at least by second row forward standards. At junior level it didn’t matter too much. He clearly had the talent although he almost wasted it at the age of 15 when he quit for a year. “A firework exploded on my foot,” he explains. “It stopped me playing and I never got back into it. I was sick of the game and I wanted to do other things. But after a season I missed it and when I started getting back into it I really enjoyed it.” When a Bradford Bulls talent scout spotted him playing for local amateur side Stanningley as an 18-year-old in 1996, the importance of weight training was immediately ingrained into him. No sooner had he signed professional terms than he was in the weights room learning how to bulk up effectively. Talent will take you so far but in the Super League land of the giants, size matters. The Bulls have been the dominant Super League force in recent years and Peacock found it difficult to break into the first team. When he was still on the fringes in 1998 the coach suggested he played in Australia for a year. “It was probably the making of me,” he says. “I was pretty young, I was out there on my own and things were tough, particularly as I was promised a job and that didn’t turn out. I was a long way from home and the Australian mentality towards the game really grabbed hold of me. Their attitude to sport is sometimes tougher than ours.” When he returned to Yorkshire he established himself in the Bulls side and was soon recognised as the best British back row forward in Super League. He was voted Player’s Player and the Man of Steel in 2003 and named Bulls captain in 2005. He received his first international call-up in 2001 and is now one of Great Britain’s most influential players. But despite all this success, he has never achieved his ultimate ambition: a series victory against Australia. It looked like it might happen last year when Britain beat the men in green and gold in the group stages of the Tri-Nations but when the two sides met in the final it turned into a 44-4 massacre. “It took me two or three weeks to get over it,” he admits. “It was worse because it was the last game of the season so there was no chance to get it out of my system. I was going to bed thinking about it.” Twelve months on and the chance of redemption awaits. Recent internationals between the two sides, last year’s Tri-Nations final aside, have been close. “A lot of it’s about belief,” says Peacock. “I remember I was so nervous when I got my first cap because of all the hype surrounding playing Australia. Now we know they’re good but they’re not unbeatable.” Britain will have to make do without former captain Andy Farrell, who switched to rugby union over the summer. St Helens star Paul Sculthorpe is also injured. But Peacock is bullish. “The realistic aim is to win it,” he says. “The number of players we have to choose from has improved. When I started there was a much smaller pool of players but since then the general standard of the Super League has got higher.” He admits Farrell is irreplaceable but adds: “Three or four years ago he would have been an even greater loss. Fortunately we have got experienced players to come in now.” He reckons the former Wigan man will be a big hit at the 15-man code. “I think he will be OK because of the way he applies himself,” he says. “In the short time I’ve been involved with him I know his training and attention to detail are second to none.” Farrell has followed the likes of Jason Robinson and Henry Paul from league to union but Peacock insists he isn’t next in line. “Being a forward, rugby union would be too technical for me,” he says. “And I enjoy rugby league too much.” He was, however, expected to make the move across West Yorkshire this winter to join Super League rivals Leeds Rhinos. As much as Peacock enjoys the game he wouldn’t mind the odd break. Since summer Super League began in 1996, the World Club Challenge has been bolted on to the start of the season and now the Tri-Nations has been stuck on to the end. “If I stay fit I could be looking at 35 or 36 games a year, which is six or eight too many,” he says. “If you play in the World Club Challenge and the Tri-Nations you’re playing from the end of January to the end of November, which is a 10-month season. It should be shorter.” It’s that relentlessness, coupled with the huge hits that the game is all about, that makes rugby league so savage. In some matches the teams look like two brick walls battering each other until one weakens. “The game tests how brave you are because it’s not natural to run as hard as you can into someone else,” says Peacock. Being a second row forward, he can expect to make as many as 30 tackles in a match, more than many rugby union players make in a month. WEIGHT TRAINING Without strength training, his body wouldn’t be able to cope. Being a hardgainer, he not only has to train harder, he also has to get more food down him. “I get sick of eating,” he says. “I have five or six meals a day. It’s one thing I won’t miss when I retire.” He weight trains five times a week, usually with his teammates but he sometimes puts in extra sessions alone because of his body type. His first session on Monday is a light, post-match flush-out workout that all the players do to get the effects of the previous weekend’s game out of their systems. The other four are heavy lifting sessions designed to build size and power. Most of the exercises he does are the same as the ones you see in gyms around the world, but the way he does them differs. In rugby league the ball is in play so often and the speed of the game so fast there is little chance to get a breather. Peacock structures his training to reflect this by allowing little or no time for recovery between sets. One of the ways they like to do this at Bradford is by supersetting an exercise with intense 10 or 30-second bursts on the rowing machine. The pattern of lifting-rowing-lifting reflects the rhythms of the game when, as Peacock puts it, “you aren’t always tackling people when you are fresh”. He trains shoulders and biceps, chest and back, and triceps and legs on different days and does a fourth power session on his own. He keeps the number of sets and repetitions low and the weights heavy to build muscle, usually working in the three sets of five reps range. His best bench press is 150 kg but on the advice of the Bulls’ management he doesn’t squat heavy. “Other clubs do, but our fitness conditioner doesn’t think it’s beneficial,” says Peacock. “You’ve got to remember that heavy leg sessions aren’t always a good idea in the season because we have to keep our legs as fresh as possible.” He nominates Sculthorpe and Stuart Fielden as two of Britain’s strongest players in the gym. Rugby league places a heavy emphasis on weightlifting moves, such as cleans and snatches, that cultivate speed and power. They also use a few sport-specific machines, such as the Grappler, which is a vertical rope attached to a pulley. From a sitting position the players pull the rope downwards as hard as they can while working against an adjustable level of resistance. The Ground Base Jammer is another popular training machine favoured by rugby league players. Originally designed for American footballers, it enables players to train in a sport-specific way by making the lifting movement simulate the way you might tackle a player. From a standing position, you step forwards and press two handles in an upward arc, as if you were approaching an opponent and launching yourself at them. M&F