Brian O’Driscoll Reveals His Hardest Ever Pre-Season Workout

Want to know what it takes to get your strength and conditioning up to scratch when you’re a professional rugby player?

BOD explained recently on his website that a few weeks after he returned from the 2009 Lions tour, he met up with his provinces’ strength and conditioning coach, Chris Dennis, who had set up  a gruelling workout.

O’Driscoll had taken an extended break after his summertime exertions, but Dennis was determined to make him pay in a workout that should have lasted only 45-50 minutes, but as O’Driscoll explains, lasted closer to an hour and a half.

It was part of a week three pre-season program that many other players had already been working through, which O’Driscoll found himself dropped into one morning.

“The session consisted of 10 exercises with each exercise containing 100 reps. The idea was to get through the session as quickly as possible. Rest times were up to you. Set repetitions were also up to you. You could attack them in big chunks with more rest time, or smaller efforts with greater speed.”

“By the sixth the exercise I was doing 5 and 6 repetitions at a go. By exercise 8 it was down to 3 and 4.  The Plate press and Extension was my last exercise and I must have finished it with 40 single reps.”

Here’s the workout in full:

100 x 60kg Deadlifts

100 x 40kg Push press

100 x 40kg Hang high pull

100 x Push ups

100 x Lying pull ups

100 x Box jumps

100 x 20kg Plate press and extension

100 x 20kg Barbell curls

100 x Tyre flips

100 x Sit ups