The Shay Rebellion | Christopher Shay

by Christopher Shay

The Exec

Ant Haynes was the youngest player on Hong Kong’s rugby sevens team when he joined at age 16. Five years later, he’s still the youngest player — and a veteran star. After scoring winning tries at last year’s Hong Kong Sevens tournament, along with the winner against China at the 2010 Asian Games, he was named captain of the squad ahead of this weekend’s Hong Kong Sevens competition. Mr. Haynes, who was born and raised in Hong Kong, started playing rugby and soccer when he was 5 years old, and moved up through the club ranks in Hong Kong. Five years ago, his coach asked him to stay after his regular club practice to watch the national rugby team train. Before he knew it, the team had him lace up his boots and lock horns with Hong Kong’s best. Though he went to college in England and played at Newcastle University, the Hong Kong Rugby Football Union regularly flew him back to Hong Kong and to tournaments around the world so he could continue to represent Hong Kong on the field. Unlike many of its opponents in the Hong Kong Sevens this weekend, the Hong Kong team is semipro, meaning the players receive no salary. They are paid only when they play in tournaments—typically, six or seven a year—so they need a day job. Mr. Haynes works as a personal trainer. “The hardest thing to do is to balance your sporting career and your professional career,” he says. The Hong Kong team is an underdog at the Sevens tournament. Still, its matches last year included a thrilling win over Wales, 21-19, in which Mr. Haynes scored the winning try with a swan dive over the line in the closing seconds. “It’s unheard-of,” he says. “They’re a professional team. They should turn teams like us over 50 points to nil.” With 40,000 fans filling the stadium, “the crowd goes wild for a try from Hong Kong,” he says. “Let’s be honest, they are quite hard to come by sometimes.”

The Workout

Mr. Haynes says between the Hong Kong sevens team and his club team, he partakes in about eight hours of rugby practice and six hours of gym training every week. The workout of the Hong Kong rugby sevens team varies with the time of year. During the summer off season, the focus is on building muscle, with weight training that incorporates a high number of repetitions on a focused area of the body. A typical workout might include five sets of eight to 10 reps of bench presses, incline bench presses and shoulder presses. This time of year, during the tournament season, the focus of team training is on explosive movement—perfecting the type of fast, powerful moves needed to play a fluid but hard-hitting sport like sevens rugby. The team’s trainer switches up the routines daily, but a typical session at tournament time might include jump squats (crouching into a squat and exploding up into the air), power cleans (pulling a weight from the floor to one’s shoulders and squatting beneath it) and push presses (driving weights from the shoulders above the head). At the start of the rugby season, the team does four or five sets of four reps each of these exercises, but as a tournament nears, they increase the weight and do just two reps each. The smaller number of reps still works on building explosiveness but doesn’t wear down the body, Mr. Haynes says.  The whole workout takes about 45 minutes. This close to the tournament the team spends three days a week in the gym, rather than the usual four, to keep their bodies fresh for competition. Mr. Haynes says he won’t spend more than an hour at a time working out in the gym. “People tend to kid themselves a lot in the gym,” he says. “They think, ‘The longer I spend in here the better it is.’” In reality, he says, the best thing is to warm up and then “make your workouts as intense as possible.” At rugby practice, Mr. Haynes says the team goes all out in drills and scrimmages. “Whenever you train, you always want to train harder than a game would be,” he says. They do different drills at every practice, but “always sprinting at 100%.”

Diet

Mr. Haynes says he’s not a calorie counter but he knows what’s good for him and what’s not. So when he orders a latte it’s with skim milk, not whole, he says, and during a recent boating trip he stuck to carrots and water while his friends worked on beer and brownies. For muscle-building protein, he favors fish and lean meats like chicken. Close to tournaments, he says he avoids alcohol, eats extra protein and drinks lots of water. A few days before a tournament, he carbo-loads for an extra boost of energy—not with starchy carbs like pasta, which he doesn’t like very much, but with high-carb fruits and vegetables like apples, pears and carrots. During a competition, he avoids eating too much or having heavy meats like steak, because it could leave him feeling laggard. But he continues to eat lots of lean protein.

Quick Fix

For his personal-training clients, Mr. Haynes designs a fresh workout every week that he says takes less than 20 minutes, requires very little equipment and works both for ordinary people and elite athletes like himself. One recent one consisted of 20 box jumps, 10 push ups, 20 walking lunges with weights, 10 wall climbs (which start from a push-up position, feet against a wall, and involve “walking” the feet up the wall and then back down) and a 100-meter sprint. It’s repeated six times, as fast as possible. He calls the exercises “a really quick blowout” and “great sevens preparation”—though he admits, “My coach will be a bit annoyed that I’m doing those things in my spare time and not following his program.”

Fitness Tip

Mr. Haynes stresses the importance of post-exercise nutrition. For about 40 minutes after a hard workout the body is primed to absorb nutrients, he says, and taking advantage by consuming the right amount of carbohydrates and protein can reduce soreness, build muscle and promote body recovery. Mr. Haynes takes advantage of the 40-minute window by downing a protein shake. “You don’t want to waste a good workout,” he says.

Published on the WSJ.com on Tuesday, March 22, 2011.