Bike Ride and Z-Health effects on Rugby

Yesterday's workout

1 hour road bike ride over hilly terrain
Rugby practice

Yesterday I went for an hour bike ride, 10 miles round trip in the Oakland hills. The ride finished up about an hour before rugby practice. I was initially wanted to do this ride earlier in the day to have more time to recover before practice, but practice still went pretty well. A lot of good things came out of this practice, as did a lot of things for me to work on.

At the beginning of practice, I took the time to go through the full joint mobility and z-health neural warm-ups. My conditioning and stamina have definitely decreased over the past two weeks while I was taking it easy to make sure my back was completely healed up. My back felt great throughout the whole practice, which was awesome. During the conditioning portion of practice I focused on finding my stride and making the runs feel easy and natural. Usually when during sprints, I put my head down and run as hard as possible. This time, for the first time I can remember, I started looking up and around at the field and the rest of the team. My eyes were had a much easier time focusing and scanning the field.

Later we played a game of touch rugby with a pass after the touch. Regular touch rugby is played very similar to flag football. In this version though, after someone was tagged, they could immediately pass the ball to another teammate behind them. As we worked into it, I began scanning side to side of the player I was about to touch tackle, seeing to whom they were most likely to pass the ball. Soon I was quickly bouncing from one "tackle" to the next, three or four in a row. Additionally as the sun set, my night vision showed a marked improvement from the last practice.

This morning upon waking I was a little sore and stiff. Next time I'll go through the joint mobility and z-health drills both before and after practice. This should help to put my nervous system at ease after the bumps, bruises and maximal efforts.