First published in the Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.

A group of rugby specialists and scientists including Professor Ross Tucker, who has written eloquently on these pages on a range of issues, recently concluded a study into the size of rugby players. More accurately, they studied the increased body mass of players.

Over the past 25 years it has been obvious to anyone who watches rugby that players have gradually increased in size. But this paper, as far as I can tell, is the most comprehensive study of the changing nature of a sport under increasing pressure because of catastrophic injuries caused mainly by head trauma as a result of collisions.

 Size does matter

In a collision sport – rugby is no longer considered a contact sport – size does indeed matter. Rugby has long been lauded as a game “for all shapes and sizes” and, for most of the amateur era, that was true. The props were always stocky (fat), strong and slow, the locks tall, the scrum halves short and quick and fly halves light and nimble, centres lithe and mobile, and wings fast.

But since the advent of professionalism in 1995, the sport has undergone a metamorphosis unlike any other as the size of backs and forwards increased. Impacts grew and the way the game was played also changed. Wings as big and heavy as locks, but with the speed of world-class sprinters, crashing into tackles made by players of equal or larger size, has altered the shape and nature of the game.

Winning collisions is vital to the sport and body mass is essential to dominating that contact.

The paper is far more comprehensive than I will have space to delve into here, but briefly it covered male players based on data gathered at Rugby World Cups between 1991 and 2019. For female players the data was gathered since 2010.

Its objective was to quantify changes in mass of players by position, and to compare changes between men and women, and between established – Tier 1 (T1) – and emerging – Tier 2 (T2) – rugby nations.

What the group found was that men’s player mass increased by an average of 9.7% among T1 nations in that timeframe. That means a player who weighed 90kg in 1991 weighs nearly 100kg now. It also revealed that T1 players have more mass than T2 players. That gap will need to close, too, if the two tiers are to merge.

What the study cannot know is the exact body/fat index of players in the different eras it covers. But for anyone who has watched rugby closely, it’s obvious that the body shape of a player in the pro era is far more muscular than in the amateur era, meaning much of that weight gain has been muscle.

Leaner and meaner

What the study did find, though, was that the majority of the increase in mass took place between 1995 and 2011. There was a small increase for male players from 2011 to 2015 and, by 2019, there was a decrease in the size from four years earlier.

That is a significant detail. It’s not yet clear whether it reveals an anomaly in that particular four-year cycle, or whether it is a trend towards lighter, more mobile players.

It would seem that the game is making more aerobic demands on players, hence the slight loss of mass. Coaches want players to have increased involvement in the game – attending more rucks, making more tackles and running support lines. That means they have to be on their feet for longer, which requires a different type of fitness level and mass requirement.

When the Boks won the 2019 Rugby World Cup (RWC), they were leaner and lighter than they had been in nearly two decades, which was part of former head of athletic performance Aled Walters’ mandate when he joined the team.

“Our idea was that the players needed to shave some body fat off because the players needed to be able to run and move more easily,” Walters told Daily Maverick shortly after the Boks won the title. “Trimming body fat was key to that part of the game plan.”

But that’s not to say there will be a trend towards pre-professional mass. It just might be an indicator that the size of players, in terms of mass, has plateaued and that we have reached a peak in professional rugby.

The paper says: “2019 was the first RWC since 1995 where neither the forwards or backs have increased in body mass. In combination with data from the club game, we suggest that elite player mass is close to reaching levels beyond which performance advantages no longer accrue, if it has not already reached that level.”

The reasons for the increases in mass are simple: players’ spending more time training and in the gym because they are full-time athletes and being drafted as juniors into an elite system. There are also indirect influences such as law changes that have placed more demands on contact areas, requiring greater mass and strength.

But the most striking revelation from the study is that rugby players have perhaps reached their peak in terms of body mass. If that is true, then the next evolution in the game will place greater emphasis on skill and tactics as coaches find other subtle ways to win. It might also mean that school coaches, particularly in South Africa, look to skills training, rather than gyms, to find the edge. That can only be a good thing for rugby, at all levels, in the long run. DM168

Craig Ray is Daily Maverick sports editor

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper which is available for free to Pick n Pay Smart Shoppers at these Pick n Pay stores.