By Sam Warburton
If you’re wondering how to build muscle for rugby, my journey from 82kg at 16 years old to 103kg by the time I signed my first professional contract might surprise you. When people hear that I gained 21 kilograms naturally between the ages of 16 and 21, there’s usually a moment of disbelief. Some assume there must have been a shortcut, while others simply don’t believe it’s possible. The truth is far less dramatic, but I think it’s much more valuable because everything I achieved physically came from structured training, good coaching, proper nutrition and learning one lesson that completely changed the direction of my career.
The truth is, though, there wasn’t a secret. There wasn’t a magic programme, a miracle supplement or an overnight breakthrough. It happened gradually over five years, and when I look back now, I honestly believe the biggest reason it happened was because somebody stopped me from making the mistake that so many ambitious young players still make today.
Ironically, that mistake wasn’t that I wasn’t training hard enough.
It was that I was training too much.
That probably sounds completely backwards, especially if you’re a young rugby player reading this with aspirations of playing academy rugby, representing your region or one day pulling on your country’s shirt. When you’re that age, you naturally think that success belongs to the player who’s willing to work the hardest. I certainly believed that. If somebody else trained four times a week, I wanted to train six. If my teammates stayed behind after a session for an extra ten minutes, I’d stay for half an hour. Every spare hour I had felt like another opportunity to improve, and I convinced myself that if I simply accumulated enough work, the results would eventually follow.
Looking back now, I realise that my commitment was never the problem. My understanding of how athletes actually develop was.
By the time I was 15, Cardiff Academy had started taking an interest in me. I wasn’t part of the system yet, but I was fortunate enough to begin spending time around coaches who had developed professional rugby players for years. At the time, I probably didn’t appreciate just how lucky I was. When you’re a teenager, you tend to think coaching is about being shown new drills or learning how to lift heavier weights. What I didn’t understand then was that the very best coaches often have the biggest impact by telling you what not to do.
I remember coming back after the Christmas break feeling incredibly pleased with myself. We’d had three weeks away from organised rugby and I’d trained on twenty of the twenty-one days. The only day I hadn’t trained was Christmas Day, and that wasn’t because I’d planned a rest day. It was simply because the gym wasn’t open. I remember walking back into training genuinely excited to tell (brag to) my coach because, in my mind, I’d proven how committed I was.
Instead, he looked at me and told me I was doing far too much and that I needed to “SLOW DOWN.”
At first, I couldn’t understand it. It genuinely didn’t make sense to me. Surely if I wanted to become stronger, bigger and fitter, the answer was to spend more time in the gym, not less. I remember thinking that perhaps he’d misunderstood me. I almost wanted to explain myself again, as though he’d somehow missed the fact that I’d been training every single day because I wanted to become the best player I could possibly be.
What I didn’t realise at the time was that he wasn’t questioning my work ethic. He was telling me that all of that work would actually end up holding me back.
That’s a completely different thing.
One of the biggest misconceptions in sport is that training itself is what makes you better. It isn’t. Training is simply the stimulus. The improvements happen afterwards, when your body has the opportunity to recover, adapt and rebuild itself stronger than before. If you’re constantly asking your body to do more work without giving it enough time, enough fuel or enough sleep to recover, you’re interrupting the very process you’re trying to create.
Nobody had ever explained that to me before.
Like a lot of young players, I’d fallen into the trap of thinking that feeling exhausted meant I’d had a productive session. If I finished a workout barely able to walk, I’d go home feeling like I’d done something worthwhile. If I wasn’t sore the next day, I’d assume I hadn’t trained hard enough. Everything was measured by effort rather than outcome.
The academy coaches completely changed that way of thinking.
Rather than adding more sessions to my week, they actually stripped a lot of them away. Looking back, I was probably doing around forty per cent less training than I had been previously.
It’s easy to do another gym session because it makes you feel productive. It’s much harder to trust a programme when it tells you that today your priority is recovery. It’s easy to add another conditioning session because it feels like you’re getting ahead. It’s much harder to leave the gym knowing you could have done more but understanding that doing more isn’t always doing better.
For the first time in my life, every session had a reason behind it.
Strength sessions were there to develop strength, not simply to leave me exhausted.
Speed sessions focused on improving speed rather than turning into conditioning workouts because I was too tired to sprint properly.
Recovery days weren’t lazy days; they were programmed into my week because my coaches knew they were just as important as the sessions themselves.
Nutrition suddenly mattered.
Hydration suddenly mattered.
Sleep suddenly mattered.
Everything started to revolve around helping my body adapt instead of simply asking it to survive another workout.
The biggest breakthrough came during my first proper pre-season with Cardiff Blues Academy. I arrived weighing around 82 kilograms, having spent most of my youth rugby playing number eight. By the end of that summer, I weighed approximately 88 kilograms. Whenever I tell people that, they’re often surprised, but what usually surprises them even more is when I tell them I actually became quicker.
There’s a common misconception among young rugby players that putting on weight automatically makes you slower. I understand why they think that because I used to worry about exactly the same thing. Nobody wants to lose the athleticism that makes them effective on the field. What I discovered, though, was that when weight gain comes from well-structured strength training, appropriate nutrition and progressive physical development, the outcome can be completely different.
I wasn’t just six kilograms heavier.
I was six kilograms stronger.
Because I was stronger, I was producing more force into the ground. Because I was producing more force, my acceleration actually improved. Instead of sacrificing speed, I was becoming a more complete athlete.
More importantly than the numbers on the scales, that first pre-season gave me something I’d never really had before.
It gave me confidence in the process.
For the first time, I wasn’t wondering whether I was doing enough. I wasn’t constantly searching for another session or another exercise because I trusted the people guiding me. I understood that the programme had been built for a reason, and that my job wasn’t to reinvent it every week. My job was simply to execute it consistently and trust that, over time, the results would take care of themselves.
That lesson ended up shaping the rest of my career.
The six kilograms I gained during that first academy pre-season wasn’t the end of the journey. In many ways, it was just the beginning.
Over the next five years, I continued following exactly the same principles. There wasn’t a point where we suddenly ripped everything up and started again because I’d reached a certain weight, and there certainly wasn’t a point where I decided I knew better than the people guiding me. If anything, the more I progressed, the more I realised the value of consistency. Every training block had a purpose. Every phase built on the last one. There were periods where the focus shifted towards building strength, others where we concentrated on power, speed or preparing for the demands of the season ahead, but the underlying philosophy never really changed.
We weren’t chasing quick results. We were building an athlete.
By the time I signed my first professional contract at the age of 20, I weighed just over 103 kilograms. Looking back, that’s the number people always focus on, but I honestly don’t think it tells the full story. If I’d simply gained 21 kilograms without becoming a better rugby player, it wouldn’t have meant anything. The goal was never to become as heavy as possible. The goal was to become physically capable of performing at the highest level of the game.
That meant being strong enough to dominate collisions, explosive enough to accelerate repeatedly over eighty minutes, robust enough to tolerate the demands of training week after week, and fit enough to keep producing those efforts under fatigue. The number on the scales was simply a by-product of years of structured development.
It’s easy to look back now, knowing where my career eventually went, and assume that everything naturally fell into place. It didn’t. Like every player, there were setbacks, frustrations and periods where progress felt slower than I wanted it to. The difference was that I trusted the process enough not to abandon it every time things became difficult. I didn’t jump from programme to programme searching for something better because I understood that meaningful physical development doesn’t happen over a few weeks. It happens over years.
That’s something I think has become even harder for young players today.
Social media has created this expectation that transformation should happen quickly. Every day you’ll see someone advertising a new programme, a new method or a new exercise that’s supposedly the missing piece you’ve been looking for. If your progress slows down for a month, you’re encouraged to try something completely different. If someone else posts a faster transformation, you start questioning whether your own plan is working.
The reality is that elite sport has never worked like that.
The players who consistently reach the highest level aren’t usually the ones chasing the newest ideas. More often than not, they’re the ones who become exceptionally good at repeating the fundamentals over and over again. They understand that the basics aren’t glamorous, but they’re effective. They show up for every session. They execute it properly. They recover well afterwards. Then they come back and do exactly the same thing again next week.
There’s a quote that I’ve always liked: “Elite performance is often the result of doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.” Looking back on my own career, I think that’s probably a fair summary.
What strikes me most now, having finished playing and spent time coaching and working with athletes, is just how fortunate I was to receive that guidance so early in my career.
I often wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t met those academy coaches.
If nobody had challenged my thinking when I was fifteen, I might have carried on exactly as I was. Continued adding more sessions every time progress slowed down. I’d have worn tiredness like a badge of honour, convincing myself that feeling exhausted meant I was getting better. I’d almost certainly have ignored recovery because, like many young players, I would’ve seen it as time I could have spent training instead.
Maybe I still would’ve become a decent rugby player.
Maybe I wouldn’t.
I’ll never know.
What I do know is that the advice I received changed the trajectory of my development, and I don’t think that’s something enough young players have access to today.
People often talk about talent as though it’s the deciding factor in whether someone makes it in professional sport. Of course talent matters, but I’ve met plenty of talented players over the years who never fulfilled their potential. They weren’t held back by a lack of ability. They were held back because they didn’t have the right information, the right structure or the right support at the stage of their development when it mattered most.
That’s the part people rarely see.
By the time selectors are choosing academy squads, regional contracts or international players, they’re not simply comparing talent. They’re comparing years of physical development. They’re comparing athletes who’ve spent years following structured programmes against others who’ve spent those same years guessing their way through training.
The gap becomes incredibly difficult to close.
That isn’t because one player wanted it more than the other.
Quite often, it’s because one player had access to good coaching while the other didn’t.
That’s the reason we created SW7 Academy.
It wasn’t because we thought the world needed another fitness app. There are already enough generic training programmes online. Every day I see people selling rugby plans despite never having worked in an elite environment, never having experienced an academy system and never having developed players to the level the programme claims to prepare them for.
Even now, with more information available than ever before, there’s still an incredible amount of misinformation. Young players are often left trying to piece together advice from social media clips, YouTube videos and whatever happens to appear on their feed that day. The problem isn’t that they’re unwilling to work hard. If anything, they’re often working incredibly hard. The problem is that hard work pointed in the wrong direction doesn’t always lead where you want it to go.
That’s why we built SW7 the way we did.
I wanted players to have access to the standard of coaching I was lucky enough to receive when I was coming up. Coaching that isn’t based on trends or gimmicks, but on the principles that genuinely underpin long-term athletic development. Whether that’s through our Rugby Performance Programme, which gives players a structured pathway to develop strength, speed and conditioning throughout the year, or through our Signature Programme, where we work with athletes on an individual basis, the philosophy is exactly the same as the one that shaped my own career.
Have a plan.
Make sure it’s the right plan.
Then have the patience to follow it.
I think that’s the hardest part for many people.
Everyone loves the idea of becoming an international rugby player. Everyone wants the outcome. Far fewer people are willing to embrace the process that gets you there. Repeating the same lifts week after week isn’t exciting. Prioritising sleep over another night out isn’t exciting. Choosing recovery when your ego tells you to squeeze in another session isn’t exciting. None of those things make for impressive social media posts, but they’re often the decisions that separate players who fulfil their potential from those who spend years wondering why they’re not progressing.
That lesson stayed with me throughout my career, and if there’s one thing I’d hope every young rugby player takes away from my story, it’s that progress isn’t measured by how much you do. It’s measured by whether what you’re doing is actually moving you closer to the player you want to become.