Earlier this year, Louis Rees-Zammit turned heads with a revelation that would have had defence coaches across the globe sleeping a little less soundly: He’s actually getting faster.
The 21-year-old from Cardiff has announced himself to the world since breaking through at Test level, really making his mark for the first time during the 2021 Six Nations Championship, when stunning tries against Ireland and Scotland laid the foundations for a victorious campaign.
Those performances in turn led to a Lions call-up last summer and he is now set to become a fixture in Wales squads for a long time to come with his performances for Gloucester rarely hitting a dip since making his debut at Kingsholm aged 18.
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Rees-Zammit credits the work he has done with Dan Tobin, Gloucester’s Head of Performance, for making him even pacier but the man himself plays down his role.
“The main thing to say is that he’s a genetic freak,” Tobin told WalesOnline. “He came to us quick, he was an unbelievable athlete. You’ve got to credit his parents for the genetics that they gave him because I haven’t made him quick, he’s quick anyway.
“You get a gem like that and then part of your job is not to f*** it up really. You get a few athletes that have to be treated differently because they get so close to this genetic ceiling of the capacity that they have, their nervous systems are so quick that when they are being really explosive it’s going to take more out of their system than a slow-twitch guy who has the capacity to repeat it more but doesn’t hit the same heights.
“So you have to account for more recovery time being required for them sometimes over other people, but also having to pay more attention to the efficiency of how they move because there is less margin for error for those guys when they’re producing that much force, power or velocity. If they get it wrong the consequences are severe injuries at times.
“Work with Louis is making sure his posture is good, that he strikes the ground well, that his hips are well-enough conditioned to handle the running speed that he’s able to produce.
“He already had the capacity to produce what he does, we didn’t give him that. We gave him the ability to repeat it safely.
“When he came to us he had a few adductor, hamstring and lower back issues. So it was just about tidying a few things up technically because he had such a big engine in terms of how quick he could move, but not necessarily the best structure in how he moved.”
Determining the exact speed of a rugby player is not a simple task. People tend to look for stats on recorded top speeds, but it is very rarely a player gets to reach these in a match environment.
For the record, Rees-Zammit reportedly hit 10.73m per seconds when scoring that remarkable try against Fiji last November, when he ate up the 20 metre head start afforded to Fijian defenders in the blink of an eye.
Tobin points out that there is not a great opportunity during the season to work on a player’s speed: “Are we going on the track two or three times a week to make him quicker? Absolutely not.” Instead he says that focus is on regular ‘microdosing’ drills that hone in on the biomechanics of running to ensure Rees-Zammit is not putting undue stress on muscles around his hips and his trunk.
While he is not keen to take too much credit for Rees-Zammit’s pace, Tobin does concede that the flying winger has gotten quicker over the last 12 months. Thought he believes his true talent is not in his top-end speed but rather in his ability to change speeds seamlessly, evidenced in his stunning solo try against Newcastle earlier this season.
“Yeah we track acceleration, we’ve got a tracker on these guys at all times. He’s progressed his acceleration over the last 12 months,” said Tobin.
“His top speed is something that he rarely gets the opportunity to hit in training or games but when he has done – I think he did it with Wales in the November series – he ran quicker again.
“That capacity is there. But being honest with you, I think his true talent is his ability to shift pace quickly. The try against Newcastle ( check it out here ) showed that ability to step without losing pace but also his ability to cruise at 60 percent and then shift to 80 percent. He didn’t actually run that fast to score that try but the way he shifts gears leaves people for dead. That’s the most impressive part of his running ability.
“His change of pace from moving slowly to shifting through gears quickly – I think he does that as well as anybody in the world.”
The way Gloucester manage Rees-Zammit does not fall in line with the oft-held belief that bigger is better in the chaos of a rugby match. They have resisted the temptation to pack muscle onto his relatively slight frame – he weighs in at 87kg – for fear that it could take away his ‘super strength’, which is his speed.
Instead, Tobin is letting nature do its work for now as Rees-Zammit naturally fills out his frame and grows as he matures into an adult.
“If we chase those qualities, if we want him squatting 50 kilos more in six months, if we want his upper body to get bigger, put some size on him – which is an easy thing to chase in a young rugby player – that could f*** up what he is good at, which is moving quickly, being explosive,” said Tobin.
“We deliberately didn’t want to chase putting a lot of muscle mass on a guy at a young age [because] he’s naturally put on about five or six kilos over two-and-a-half years when we haven’t chased it.
“There is some training involved but he is still growing and maturing physically and you’ve got to let that process happen instead of getting too excited about diving in to interfere with it. From that point of view, he’s getting stronger as he gets older. Some of the strength changes that occur as he’s maturing will drive acceleration improvement, will make him move quicker and jump higher.
“Those processes can happen pretty organically, you’re just nudging it along and making sure the progressions are appropriate and you’re not chasing anything hard that could take the wheels off the track.
“He’s more of a management project than a development one.”
Staff within Wales’ management group are involved in the project. Head of Physical Performance Paul Stridgeon and Sports Scientist Ryan Chambers are in regular contact with Gloucester, with both camps sharing things like the winger’s GPS reports, what sort of training he has been doing and whether there have been any injury issues whilst he is in their care.
It all keeps the wheels turning – rapidly, in Rees-Zammit’s case – as he develops from a talented youngster to a fully-fledged international star. But at the age of 21, there is still more to come. Though Tobin feels that growth might not necessarily be in his top-end speed, which is likely to improve anyway, but in the Welshman becoming a more rounded player.
“Obviously people get excited about how quick he is but the thing to remember is that he plays a complex, chaotic sport. He’s a rugby player. For me, our first priority is to keep him injury free so he gets as many games as he can in his career. The second priority is to make him as effective a rugby player as you possibly can.
“It’s not necessarily about topping out at 10.5 metres per second because it’s so rare that opportunity actually comes. He’ll always have that capacity there but for us it’s about making him as effective as we can through rugby bits, decision-making bits, ability to execute his skill while running at pace. To me, it’s a combination of rugby coaches and us getting him right, the medical team keeping him sweet. That’ll be the combination of making him as good a player as he can possibly be throughout his career.
“The game has gone past just trying to put the best athletes on the field. They have to be good decision-makers, be able to operate at a high skill level. He has a combination of all those things. It’s not about trying to top out his athletic ability because if we went down that rabbit hole then we’d probably miss something else in his development that we should be focusing on because it’s too one-dimensional.”
Tobin concluded: “Zam is such a driven individual, he desperately wants to be the best he can be and he just soaks in any information that he’s given. That combination along with his genetic ability makes him what he is.
“As long as he continues in that vein he’ll go a long way.”
