I was always the smallest player in the room.

Two older brothers. Backyard rugby every afternoon. No fear — but never first picked.

When I got to a competitive level I did what every coach told me. Bulk up. Get heavy. Train hard. So I trained five, six, seven days a week. High reps. Heavy volume. Chase the pump. Get sore. That's how you grow.

By 20 I started noticing something wasn't adding up.

I was training harder than anyone I knew. And I wasn't getting faster. I wasn't hitting harder. I wasn't dominating. I was getting bigger in the mirror — but it wasn't showing up on the field.

So I stopped following programs and started studying them.

Why does a muscle actually grow. Why does gym strength transfer to the field — or not. Why do some players get massive and stay exactly the same on the field while others train half as much and dominate.

What I found changed everything.

Almost every program being handed to rugby players was built on bodybuilding principles — designed for people using steroids who do nothing but recover. High volume. Train to failure. Soreness as feedback. It was never designed for a natural athlete who has to perform on the weekend.

I rebuilt my training from scratch. Lower volume. Heavier weights. Smarter exercise selection. Less damage. More tension. Training that was built around how force actually transfers to rugby movements — not how a bodybuilder gets bigger.

The results on the field were immediate.

I still got told I was too small. 175cm. 85kg. Not big enough. Won't last. Your ceiling is lower than everyone else's.

I played 1st grade Shute Shield.

Not because my genetics changed. Because I finally understood how to train.

I became a PT almost by accident — just something to do when I left school. I had no plan. No grand vision. Rugby players started coming to me not because I marketed myself but because they saw what I looked like on the field and wanted to know what I was doing in the gym.

That was 16 years ago.

Since then I've coached over 10,000 athletes. Park players. School kids. Rep players. Professionals. Olympians. RDC was built on the back of parents and players seeing our results and coming to me for help.

At 26 I had a second realisation. The power cleans. The trap bar jumps. The push press. The whole standard rugby S&C menu. I looked at the data properly and compared it against what happened when players instead got seriously strong at one end of the force-velocity curve and seriously fast at the other.

The power zone has no specific adaptations. Players who dropped it and trained the ends got more powerful. Every time.

I'm still obsessed. I still test everything. I still change what I do when the evidence says I'm wrong.

The programs I write now are the programs I wish I had when I was 18 — the smallest kid on the field who just wanted to be a beast.