Worcester Warriors - Stuart Pickering

Stuart Pickering started as an assistant strength and conditioning coach at Hartubury College before moving on to become the academy strength and conditioning coach at Gloucester Rugby. He moved to Worcester Warriors in early 2005 in the same role and progressed to become Head of Strength and Conditioning in 2011.

“We invested in the MyoTruk and MyoThrusta in the preseason of 2012, since then it has become an integral part of our strength training programme.

The MyoThrusta is used primarily with our injured players or players that have axial loading issues or any players that have lumbar spine issues, hip or shoulder issues.

With the MyoThrusta, the main aspect is we can keep players lower body strength training every week. Because of the severity of the collisions involved in the game, a lot of guys week to week pick up injuries that traditionally, would mean that we would be unable to really do much to increase lower body strength.

The MyoTruk forms a big part of our forwards training programme in particular, mainly because of the specificity of the movement in relation to the tasks on the field, particularly scrums, mauls and rucks.

However the MyoTruk is also used heavily by our backs as well, primarily because our speed coach likes the patterns the backs get into from an acceleration perspective.  So the shin angles we can produce on that with some horizontal force mean that we get some transfer across acceleration patterns with the backs.

For me, the MyoTruk and MyoThrusta have been the best investment we have made in our strength equipment in my time in strength and conditioning.”

Stuart Pickering - Head of S&C, Worcester Warriors