SMPerformance

09/03/2026

Current international winger on the Canadian senior men’s national team Jo Mór came in to coach a session with the athletes at SMPerformance.

We worked footwork, offloading and support play. The small stuff that often goes overlooked until you see someone do it at the top level and realise how deliberate and impactful it is.

That is what these athletes get access to. Coaching from players who are in the environment right now, at the level they are trying to reach. Josiah will be back in, along with more pros, ex pros and high level coaches with him.

Sign up for the offseason block closes in 3 days. 2 spots left for boys, 3 for girls.

09/01/2026

08/31/2026

The biggest gap between high school and university rugby is physicality THEN skill.

Most first years spend a season in the gym getting big enough to be selected. That year could have already been done.

15 weeks at Apex Training Centre , September 8 to December 20. Groups of four to six, tested at the start and retested at the end. InBody, timing gates, one rep max. You finish with a written report showing exactly what moved.

6 spots max per group. Booking closes Sunday.

Link in bio.

Send this to a young rugby player in the GTA who wants to arrive at the next level already big enough, or to a parent who I doesn’t want to watch their kid lose a year to the weight room.

08/30/2026

3️⃣ Snaps 🏉

First snap is to catch the ball early and off the chest
Second snap is to snap you head towards your target
Third snap is to snap your hands through and end up pointing towards the intended target

08/30/2026

Leg drive!

A nice easy change I like to make when hitting tackle tube. I find it really helps engrain that habit of chasing the feet in contact.

08/28/2026

Pressure 😡💨

Often when we see super dominate scrum we think that’s them running their feet really hard like a prowler push or tackle.

This certainly can and does happen particularly when one side vastly outweighs/outmatches the other side.

However, when the two packs are similarly matched it is much hard and often detrimental to try and run your feet like that.

If you build a huge amount of pressure by pushing with both legs as hard as you can as one group of 8 (and sustain that pressure) eventually the opposition will either lose their posture or better yet take a step back.

Once that happens a pocket of low pressure emerges and that when you can take advantage of it and run your feet hard and take them out.

The scrum going forward at a rate of knots is often a result of the insane sustained pressure built by the dominate pack.

08/24/2026

Deep Shoulder!

Getting your shoulder as deep as possible into the ball carrier will better allow you to manipulate them and will keep you a lot safer.

Essentially you want to get your spine as close to their centre line as possible so it allows you to fully transfer the force produced by your lower body through your spine and into the ball carrier. Every inch you move away from that centre line you decrease that efficiency of force transfer and not only have a higher risk of injury but also will hit with less of a punch.

08/21/2026

Throw with Confidence and Conviction 🏉

When throwing the ball into a line out you want to have the upmost confidence that the ball is going to go exactly where you intend it to.

That confidence not only gives you the best opportunity to throw a good seed but also gives the rest of the lineout confidence to excecute their job. Nothing makes a lineout go to crap quicker than a ho**er that everyone knows doesn’t trust their throw (I’ve been there and it sucks for everyone).

If you get super tense to throw the ball, it’s a big sign that you don’t trust your technique and you are compensating for that by tightening everything up. On the flip side if you are so nonchalant that you are really loose, you don’t inspire much confidence that you know what you are doing either. A calm, cool and collected professional attitude where you are set up and ready to go with an air of assurance will do the trick.

The only way you build that confidence up is by putting in so much practice that it would be almost impossible for you to be bad.

When I was struggling with my throwing with the Arrows I got some mentorship from the great Raymond Barkwill and 2 things he said to me really stuck in my mind:

1️⃣ The Ho**er must be the leader of the lineout and must have the unwavering confidence from the rest of the group (and themselves) that they will excecute their role

2️⃣ You can only get that confidence by building evidence and proof that you are a good thrower of the ball by ensuring you get at least 1000 throws a week and that you nail your throws when it really matters.

Now 1000 throws a week is much easier when it’s your job to get better at rugby but for an amateur player 100 to 150 throws before and after practice twice a week shouldn’t be too hard to accomplish and will get you well on your way to throwing with swagger and conviction.

08/15/2026

Comment “Tackle” to join the waitlist for my online tackling course Tackle Mastery and $50 off.

The course goes into great depth with everything surrounding the tackle and will get you from hesitant and scared of tackling to a confident and feared defensive force.

Leverage

On defence you are naturally at a disadvantage as the attack dictates the game and we must react to what they show us.

If we want to be an effective defence we have to stack the deck in our favour as much as possible and try to force the attack to do what we want them to do.

We can achieve this through a voracity of means but one way is by our positioning relative to the ball carrier.

If we play “heads up” on an attacker we give them a multitude of options to use therefore making our job much harder. If we take away one side then we are stacking the deck and forcing them to choose an option that we want.

If a whole team can get on board with this then we will have an “attacking defence”.

There’s so much more detail that goes into it which is explored in Tackle Mastery, it’s a project I am incredibly proud of and I know will help people massively on their journey to becoming dominant and confident tacklers 💪