Coached By Players
Who've Done It.

Pat Searson

The smallest kid in the room who got tired of being told his ceiling was lower than everyone else's.

1st Grade Shute Shield

Always The Smallest Player In The Room

Two older brothers. Backyard rugby every afternoon. No fear — but never first picked. When Pat got to a competitive level he did what every coach told him: bulk up, get heavy, train hard. Five, six, seven days a week. High reps, heavy volume, chase the pump.

By 20 it wasn't adding up. He was training harder than anyone he knew and getting bigger in the mirror — but it wasn't showing up on the field.

So he 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 he found changed everything. Almost every program 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.

He rebuilt his training from scratch. Lower volume. Heavier weights. Smarter exercise selection. Less damage, more tension — built around how force actually transfers to rugby movements, not how a bodybuilder gets bigger. The results on the field were immediate.

Still told he was too small. 175cm. 85kg. Won't last. He played 1st grade Shute Shield anyway.

Not because his genetics changed. Because he finally understood how to train.

Pat became a PT almost by accident — just something to do after school. Rugby players started coming to him, not because he marketed himself, but because they saw what he looked like on the field and wanted to know what he was doing in the gym. That was 16 years ago.

Since then he's coached over 10,000 athletes — park players, school kids, rep players, professionals, Olympians. RDC was built on the back of parents and players seeing the results and coming to him for help.

At 26 came a second realisation. The power cleans, the trap bar jumps, the push press — the whole standard rugby S&C menu. He looked at the data properly and compared it against players who instead got seriously strong at one end of the force-velocity curve and seriously fast at the other. The power zone had no specific adaptations. Players who dropped it and trained the ends got more powerful. Every time.

He's still obsessed. He still tests everything. He still changes what he does when the evidence says he's wrong. The programs he writes now are the ones he wishes he'd had at 18 — the smallest kid on the field who just wanted to be a beast.