Rugby Speed Training: Drills, Technique and Tests to Get Faster

What does good sprint technique look like?

A sprinting foot is on the ground for about a tenth of a second, and that is all the time you get to push. Phil Healey’s speed lessons in the app come back to the same few things:

• Stiff ankles. His Strength For Speed Wins lesson is about why ankle stiffness is the key to power and speed, with a bike-tyre analogy for how stiff ankles save energy.
• Use the ground. The same lesson shows how to use the ground to propel you faster.
• Upright posture. His high knees drill trains upright posture and hip activation.
• Flexible hips. Hip flexibility unlocks longer, faster strides, and his Train for Top Speed lesson calls flexibility and stride length the shortcut to more speed.

For the start, Maddison Levi’s banded acceleration drill sets the position: the left leg as the base, the opposite arm forward and the sprint stance loaded. Then drive: the hips punch through and the knee drives up.

The best speed drills for rugby

The best speed drills for rugby are the ones below, from our programs and our coaches’ lessons. Run them fresh, early in a session, with full recovery. A few quality metres beats a hundred tired ones.

Marching and skipping drills

Phil Healey’s Sprint Activation lesson runs them in order: fast feet to switch on the nervous system, high knees for upright posture and hip activation, then low drive skips, high drive skips, A-skips and B-skips. His sprint mechanics lessons add switches, building from single leg switches and single leg pogo skips to a 1, 2, 3 switch, and explain why ankle stiffness matters in the switch drill.

In our power and workout guides these drills sit inside a 10-minute warm-up: skips, leg swings, 2 × 10 pogo hops and three build-up runs over 20 m.

Resisted sprints

Maddison Levi’s banded acceleration drill puts a band around your waist, held by a partner behind you. Set the sprint position, then drive against the band: the hips punch through and the knee drives up, for fast acceleration mechanics.

Sprints from a standing start

The speed day in our four-week rugby workout plan is sprints from a standing start: 6 × 30 m with a walk back, then 8 × 30 m in the next block. Backs swap the plan’s 40/20 repeats for six 30 m sprints from a standing start with a walk back, because their job is speed into space.

Flying sprints

Flying sprints start from a rolling 20 m run-up, so the part that counts is all top speed. The power block of the workout plan runs 6 × 40 m flying for top-end speed. Build up to full speed first: Phil Healey’s warm-up lesson takes sprint build-ups through 75%, 85% and 95% before kick-off.

Reactive starts

Maddison Levi’s reaction speed drill puts two players at the poles. Both sprint to a middle cone: one chooses late, and the other follows fast. On “ready, set, go”, move quick on the call.

Strength and power for speed

Strength comes first, because power is strength used quickly, and you cannot use force you do not have. Our gym program calls the back squat the most direct transfer to sprint power. Phil Healey’s Train for Top Speed lesson puts relative strength and a powerful posterior chain behind winning races, with a squat of twice your body weight as the strength standard to chase.

For the halves and outside backs, speed is the product and the gym serves it: force at speed (jumps, hip thrusts, lighter faster lifts) and hamstring work every week. The Nordic hamstring curl, 3 × 5, is the one accessory nobody who sprints should skip, because the hamstring is where a fast player’s season ends.

Pogo hops train stiff, quick ankles for the short ground contacts of sprinting: 3 × 10 in the off-season, 3 × 12 in pre-season and 2 × 10 in season, with 60 seconds’ rest. The jumps, throws and fast lifts are in rugby power training, and the heavy lifts underneath them are in the rugby gym program.

Speed training by position

Every position sprints. What changes is the kind of speed work, and the table shows it for each of the six position groups Elite Rugby App programs, as our guides and plans already set it out.

Not sure which group you belong in? Find the position your body suits first, then take its row above.

How much speed training, in and out of season?

Put the sprinting before the fatigue, not after it, in every part of the season, because tired sprinting trains you to be slow. What changes through the year is how often you sprint and what kind of sprints they are.

In the six-week pre-season, that is 6 × 20 m sprints run fresh in weeks 1 and 2, then 6 × 30 m in week 3 and 8 × 30 m in week 4. In a week with two matches, speed is a 15-minute primer of light power and a few strides, and nothing that leaves soreness. The whole week around it is in the rugby training programme, and the weeks before round one are in rugby pre-season training.

How to test your speed over 10 and 40 metres

You test speed with a 10 m sprint for acceleration and a 40 m sprint for top speed, timed with gates or a phone app, and taken fresh.

Retest the same way: the same field, the same boots, the same time of day and the same person on the stopwatch, every four to six weeks. Hand timing is rough over a short sprint, so only trust a change that shows up on every run. The workout plan’s last week does exactly this: 4 × 30 m, timed over the same distance as week 1. For fitness rather than speed, time a Bronco with our free Bronco test timer.

Made with Phil Healey

Phil HealeyRugby union strength and conditioning coach

Phil Healey is a New Zealand rugby union strength and conditioning coach whose record runs from Counties Manukau and the Chiefs to Glasgow Warriors, the Blues and the Kobe Steelers. Phil is Elite Rugby App's head of programming.

• Counties Manukau 2003-2008
• Chiefs 2008-2017
• Glasgow Warriors 2017-2018
• Blues
• Kobe Steelers
• New Zealand head of performance from 2026

More about Phil Healey

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