How to plan a rugby training session in 10 minutes

Most rugby coaches I know spend more time fighting with the planning than actually planning. A note on the back of a clipboard. A spreadsheet that hasn’t been opened since 2019. Three drills you remember from a course but can’t quite picture. The week slides on, training starts, you wing it. The squad notice.

This is the routine I use to plan a rugby training session in about ten minutes. It works for U13s, it works for the firsts. It’s pen-and-paper-friendly. And it’s the spine of how SetPiece is built — so if you’d rather have an app do the bookkeeping while you focus on the coaching, that’s there too.

Step 1 — Pick one focus (one minute)

Don’t plan the session yet. Plan the theme. One pillar: attack shape, defensive line speed, set-piece, conditioning, decision-making under fatigue. Just one. If you can’t say the focus in five words, you’re not focused.

Write it at the top of the page. Everything below has to earn its place against that line.

Step 2 — Build the spine: warm-up, primary, secondary, finisher (three minutes)

A rugby session has a rhythm. Four blocks:

• Warm-up (10–15 min) — get the heart rate up, move every joint, end with something that hints at the theme.
• Primary drill (20–25 min) — the one that earns the session’s name. It does the focus. It’s the drill you’d keep if you had to drop the others.
• Secondary drill (15–20 min) — supports the primary. Same shape, different constraint. Or the same skill, more pressure.
• Finisher (5–10 min) — a game, a competition, a captain’s run-through. Something the squad walks off remembering.

For an attack-shape session, that might be: dynamic warm-up with passing → 4-on-3 grids in tight channels → phase play off scrum → opposed game with a points bonus for hitting width within three phases.

Total: 50–70 minutes of drill time. Leave 5–10 for water, talk, and the inevitable boot-tying delay.

Step 3 — Time the drills, not the session (two minutes)

A common mistake: blocking the whole session at 75 minutes and hoping it lands. It won’t. Time each drill. Give every drill a minute count and an intensity hint (cruise / press / max).

The minutes have to add up to the session length. That sounds obvious; it’s the single most-skipped step in coaching prep. If your four drills sum to 90 minutes and your session is 75, something has to give before you get to the field, not when a parent is honking the horn at the gate.

In SetPiece, this is enforced automatically — drill minutes always equal session duration, recomputed every time you nudge a number. But you can do it in a notebook just as well.

Step 4 — Sketch the play, if there is one (two minutes)

If the primary drill has a designed pattern — a strike move off a scrum, a lineout drive, an exit play — sketch it once. Stick figures are fine. Arrows for runs, dotted lines for passes, a single circle for the kick. Two notes underneath: the cue word the 9 uses, and the exit if it breaks down.

If you can’t draw it in two minutes, the squad won’t run it in three phases.

This is the bit SetPiece’s playbook editor is for: a geometry-first canvas where you place actors, draw runs with per-segment intensity, and the app tells you whether the move is watchable (flight times under four seconds are real; over four, you’ve drawn a pass nobody catches). But a notebook works fine for v1.

Step 5 — Decide the squad in the room (one minute)

Look at availability. Who’s injured? Who’s away on exams? Who needs minutes? Mark the bench rotation if you’re cycling people. If you’ve got an under-strength session, swap the secondary drill for something that runs at any number — small-sided games scale, set-piece reps don’t.

If you use a tool like SetPiece, squad availability is already on the screen — players never sign in, the coach holds the roster, and availability is one tap. If you use paper, a short WhatsApp roll-call the night before works almost as well.

Step 6 — Run it from the touchline (one minute of prep)

The plan is no use if it stays in your bag. Before training, write the drill names + minutes on a single index card, in order. Phone it in if you have to: a notes app with four lines beats a spreadsheet you can’t read in the rain.

Or open the app. SetPiece’s run mode keeps the screen on, walks you through each drill on a timer, and shows the animation right there on the touchline — no squinting at notes between whistles. The same plan you built on the train home becomes the plan you run two hours later. That’s the whole product, really: planning that survives contact with Saturday.

The ten minutes back

Ten minutes of planning isn’t the goal. The goal is the quality of the next ten minutes: the ones with a squad in front of you. A plan that fits on an index card, a focus that fits in five words, drills that add to the right total — that’s what gives you space to coach instead of recite.

If you want a tool that holds the spine of this routine for you and shows up on the touchline when you press Start, join the SetPiece waitlist. One app, one team, one price.