BORN TO BE A BULL! BY JOHN PLUMMER ROBBIE PAUL IS AN UNBELIEVABLE ATHLETE. HE’S QUICK, HAS GREAT ENDURANCE AND IS INCREDIBLY STRONG! Robbie Paul has been injured for months and the editor was worried that he might not be in shape for a shirts-off photoshoot. But Robbie, 28, captain of the all-conquering Bradford Bulls, is not the kind of guy that lets a broken arm get in the way of his gym work. He is a fitness junkie, and when he peels off his top, he reveals a torso so toned you suspect he was born with a six pack. At 13 stone 4 pounds, the New Zealander is a pygmy in Super League’s land of the giants. Yet his lack of size belies astonishing strength. He can bench press 140 kgs - more than 300 pounds - for reps. Strong enough to take the hits yet agile enough to jink out of tackles, he has become a superstar of the sport and a legend in Bradford, the club he has represented since 1994. Last year, under his leadership, the Bulls won every trophy going and this year they beat Australian side Penrith Panthers to become World Club Champions. “Robbie is an unbelievable athlete,” says Martin Clawson, the Bulls’ head strength and conditioning coach. “He is quick off the mark, has great endurance and is incredibly strong.” You may be looking at the fittest man in rugby. Robbie jokes that it’s down to a fast metabolism. “I s*** five times a day,” he says. He is, of course, talking crap. Sure, he has good genes. But the secret is he loves training and continually pushes himself. “I’ve played sport practically every day since the age of four,” he says. “I get an endorphin rush when I go to the gym and if I don’t feel tired at the end of the day, I can’t sleep.” Robbie arrived in West Yorkshire a decade ago as a raw 18-year-old. Two years later he was awarded the Lance Todd trophy at the 1996 Challenge Cup Final for a scintillating Man of the Match performance in which he scored three tries. Since then he has won every domestic honour, played for New Zealand and even tried his hand at rugby union with Premiership side Harlequins. His brother, Henry, also made the switch to the 15-man code and has represented England after qualifying through his mother. Now back from injury, Robbie is at the peak of his game and leading a team that has greatness within its grasp. “Wigan were the team of the late 1980s and early 1990s because they rolled it over year after year,” he says. “Now we have a chance to go down in history as one of the great teams. To be captain of something like that would be awesome.” And the key to greatness? Fitness. It’s no coincidence that Bradford’s rise has coincided with it becoming possibly the most physically advanced rugby club, league or union, across the UK. England’s success at last year’s rugby union World Cup was largely attributed to the team’s radical new approach to fitness. But the rewards reaped by Clive Woodward’s team were widely sown in rugby league, the game’s 13-aside cousin, where professionalism has much deeper roots. Union continues to turn to league for ideas and nowhere is studied more closely than Bradford, whose training ground has been monitored by, among others, top union clubs Bath and Leicester. In the 1990s the Bulls became the first rugby team to pioneer serious weight training. Now head coach Brian Noble leads a team of six coaches that is adding endurance to power. “This season more than ever we have concentrated on fitness,” says Robbie. “We want to achieve what we did last year but this year we want to be fitter. “There were times last season when we got caught out. We played London Broncos (which is full of Aussies) on a red hot day and our big Kiwi boys were blowing out of their backsides. We asked each other ‘who here can’t be fitter?’.” Robbie talks a lot about comfort zones, and how they can inhibit people from taking their training to the next level. “The body is the most amazing thing,” he says. “Everyone has a level they feel comfortable training at and you have to keep extending it. You have to create overload.” “We have a lot of young players here who hit a peak in fitness and don’t realise they have to keep pushing it because in this team you don’t get a rest. It’s no good being able to make three tackles if you can’t get your butt off the floor and make the fourth, the fifth and the sixth.” While other rugby teams turn their way for ideas, the Bulls themselves are not averse to pinching a few secrets from other sports, including swimming, boxing, wrestling and even American football. “We let them spend millions of pounds testing things then we steal the best bits,” jokes Robbie. He is just as willing to try alternative therapies as he is alternative sports in his quest for the edge. “Magnet therapy, massage, Reiki… you name it,” he says. After breaking his arm in June last year he had sessions in an oxygen tank to speed up his recovery. Being sidelined clearly isn’t easy for a man who admits that his moods are linked to his activity levels, particularly as he was playing some of the best rugby of his career at the time of the break. “The injury stopped contact work but didn’t stop me running,” he says. “Me and the treadmill developed an intimate relationship.” As the 2003 season counted down and the Bulls prepared to face Wigan in the Grand Final, Robbie couldn’t take any more. He had a titanium plate inserted to hold the bone together and in the biggest game of the season, in one of the hardest sports in the world, he came on as substitute and played with a broken arm. Bradford won but lunacy, surely? “We’re not playing tiddlywinks,” he says. “We’re paid to do a job and if I re-injured it I had all the off season to get better.” Besides wrecking his arm, Robbie has broken his jaw, dislocated both feet and suffered a collapsed lung. He’s been rewarded for all his pain, not to mention his many memorable, hot-stepping scrum half performances with a testimonial in 2004. Never one to miss a media trick, he’s organising a series of events with a ‘League v Union’ theme. “Everyone is always talking about it, so why not?” he asks. Why not indeed. So do tough, northern league players still think union is for softies? Robbie pauses: he knows he shouldn’t get into this one but he can’t help it. Recalling his time at Harlequins he says: “If I did the same workload here as I did there I would be sacked.” Brother Henry also spoke about the different training expectations when he went across to union three years ago. It didn’t do him any favours but few would argue union has kicked on since then as the effects of professionalism have swept across the game. Robbie concedes that at international level, league lags well behind. “Rugby union is a truly global sport,” he says. “In league there are only three strong nations. A tri-nations competition is the best way forward so the best regularly play the best.” He says the union world cup benefited both codes and speaks glowingly of his former league rival, Jason Robinson. “He can go from a standing start to a sprint within two metres,” he says. “Because the defensive lines aren’t as structured in union the extra space allows him to show his ability.” Robbie also admits that despite the Bulls being world champions, Australian rugby league still has greater strength in depth. “We’d be able to compete but consistency is the key,” he says. “It’d take a couple of years to adjust.” His experience and strong opinions suggest a future in coaching. “No way,” he insists. “You depend on other people too much. I’ve seen too many coaches go old, grey and fat.” Not that Robbie is likely to be short of options: he is a bit of a Renaissance man who paints, has appeared in a play and presents a radio show. He’s even a qualified nail technician, not something many rugby players would ever admit. He has set his eye on the media and took the opportunity presented last year by injury to step up his work in this area. At 28, and with his devotion to fitness, he should be good for several more seasons of Super League yet. But whatever Robbie does when he retires, we reckon it’s a fair bet that when he turns 60 he’ll still have a six pack. BUILDING FOR THE FUTURE With 20 stone-plus forwards, it’s not difficult to see why Bradford Bulls can batter any team on planet Earth. “Physically we’re the biggest rugby league team in the world,” says Robbie. But size is only an advantage if it doesn’t compromise other aspects of fitness, as Robbie, a relatively little guy, knows better than most. “If we can get our forwards running on engines the size of people half their weight they can be better than great,” he says. The man charged with injecting quality fuel is Martin Clawson, the Bulls’ head strength and conditioning coach and self-confessed ‘world’s saddest man’. While the rest of us sleep, Martin surfs Eurosport or watches wrestling videos to find some new kind of training technique that he can try in training. “I feel sorry for my family because I never finish work,” he says. Martin, 39, joined the Bulls three years ago when they had already forged a reputation for beefing themselves up by taking a more serious approach to weight training. A former Bradford player and bodybuilder, his focus has been on improving the players’ speed and stamina while retaining their muscle. The trophy cabinet suggests it’s working. As Martin’s nocturnal habits indicate, he’s a big believer in fusing the best bits from other sports. The club hires wrestling coaches to demonstrate the best way to take a man down. “If a player’s tackling technique is good they save energy,” he says. Boxing pad work is regularly used. “It speeds up reactions and is good for agility,” says Martin. He’s a big believer in the value of rowing machines for working all the major muscles. A typical session involves rowing 300 metres in a minute, rest for a minute then repeat - 35 times. “It brings on the disco lights,” he says, referring to the mental state of torture that comes with being frazzled beyond exhaustion. When a player sees the disco lights it isn’t a sign to end the session. In fact, quite the opposite. Being shattered is part of sport but in professional rugby league it isn’t an excuse for a dip in performance. Short, explosive bursts and the ability to recover quickly are the name of the game, which is why teaching the body to fight back from fatigue is a major part of Clawson’s world of pain. “We end our sessions harder than we begin them so in a game situation when they are blowing hard they have been there before,” he says. It’s this approach that has earned the Bulls a reputation as a team that can turn it on in the last 15 minutes. “If we don’t blast them off the pitch in the first half we wear them down in the second,” says Clawson. The power to blast teams away is honed in the weights room. “We jumped ahead of other teams because we recognised that because it’s a collision sport you have to be big and powerful,” he says. “When the game went full time, other professional teams realised they couldn’t work on their skills all day so they started using weights to fill their day but in general they didn’t know what to do.” Bradford’s weights programme changes according to the time of year. Players get five weeks off at the end of the season before pre-season gym work begins. The initial emphasis is on building strength and power, usually one body part a day, five days a week. In the first week they do 12 reps per set; by week four it’s down to short, hard, mass-building sets of four to six reps. They train in pairs, resting only as long as it takes their partner to complete a set. “Even though the emphasis is on building muscle we still train intensely,” says Martin. Shoulder exercises include: seated front press on the Smith machine, seated side laterals, upright row, the ground-base jammer, shrugs and power shrugs. Chest and back, opposite muscle groups, are worked the same day. A typical session involves bench press, lat pulldown, incline press, T-bar rows, decline press and single arm dumbbell rows: all no-frills muscle builders. Preacher curls, lying triceps curls to the forehead, seated dumbbell curls, triceps pushdown with either rope or bar, hammer curls and weighted bench dips are the staple ingredients of arm days. A leg session typically includes leg press, hack squat, hamstring curl, dumbbell deadlifts, thigh extension, weighted sissy squats, and squats. “Legs are always the last session of the week because after we’ve trained them you’re totally blown,” says Martin. The pre-season programme is followed by a recovery week when the players adopt a more high rep approach to training that switches the emphasis from building to conditioning. They then undergo a four-week power phase which again employs higher reps but involves more Olympic weightlifting moves that increase explosive power. Once the season begins the phases switch at rapid intervals according to whether the squad is focusing on strength or stamina. While many professional sportsmen lose weight over a season, the Bulls actually want to see their players increase body mass, providing it’s muscle they put on. “We look for two per cent more on each player,” says Martin. Club nutrition sponsors, Perfect Performance, help the players to achieve this by providing protein shakes. The attention to nutritional detail also means the players undergo a mini carb load each week, upping their intake of carbohydrates immediately after a match and reducing them in the run-up to the following game. Never ones to stand still, the Bulls are looking at buying their players masks that simulate the effects of altitude training, which could provide them with another fitness edge. The race to stay ahead never stops. It might not be good for Martin’s sanity but it is keeping the team on top. Although the Bulls suffered a shock defeat to St Helens in the Challenge Cup early in 2004, they started the Super League season in style. Don’t expect them to fade away through lack of fitness. M&F

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