Prepare Like a Starter: A Proactive Approach to Keeping Non-Starters Match-Ready

Recorded on Friday, 6th February 2026

What happens when your next starter hasn’t played a match in three weeks and gets called on tomorrow? 

As a coach, you can’t afford to wait until match week to find out whether a player is ready. That means ensuring every player can tolerate the full physiological demands of competition before they’re called upon.

Live webinar  was held on Friday, 6th February 2026, with Jake Gillies and Jonathan Ward from Bristol Bears Rugby Club, as they revealed how they ensure all of their team’s non-playing players are ready to start on match day.

During this live session hosted by Firstbeat’s Christoph Rottensteiner, Jake and Jonathan discuss:

• Proactively managing non-starters to keep them match-ready
• Managing return-to-play protocols supported by physiological data
• Supporting rehabilitation and overseeing players who are unfit or outliers
• Simplifying metrics and data, and communicating them effectively to players
• What to do when coaches intervene in real time

What Rugby Coaches Asked Bristol Bears After Our Webinar

During the webinar, we received a number of great follow-up questions from coaches and performance staff.

The discussion covered everything from how to communicate training load to players, to which metrics coaches trust most, and how they manage top-ups for non-selected players.

Hey guys, thanks for sharing your insights! What are the parameters of the FirstBeat System that you rely on most? TRIMP/ Movement Load/ EPOC/ …?

When talking to players, we primarily use time in HR zones because players understand minutes, whereas some of the more complex metrics can be beyond their scope of understanding, or attention span! Within our coaching group, we like to look at TRIMP and TRIMP/min as measures of long-term volume and drill intensity.

Have you looked into MIPs (Maximum Intensity Periods) and if yes what time periods do you consider the most relevant/useful in rugby?

Not currently, but it is something we are looking to add it in to our practice. I think I mentioned in the webinar that we are gradually adding different metrics that we find useful, rather than adding too many at once. In terms of time periods, when using GPS we look at the following time periods: 30s, 60s, 120s, 180s, 300s, and then particular periods that are relevant to our match ball in play periods.

Is the heartbeat the only setting you are looking for when you seek for load markers?

Time in heart rate zones and TRIMP would be our key load markers.

When you do your top-ups for the non-24, do you run the heart rate live, or do you just have a bank for drills where you know roughly the heart rate response?

The latter. We initially used the live information for pre-season fixtures to gauge an idea of the heart rate response, but in competitive matches, we don’t.

Could you give an example of what a small-sided game with the TR after game day warm up would look like? And the follow-up straight line running, and the work-to-rest ratio utilised?

We have around 6 – 7 minutes to run games, so the thing we prioritise is density of work. We would alter the space available depending on the number of players we have, but the typical work-rest ratio would be highly skewed towards work, it tends to be 45/50 seconds of games followed by 10/15 seconds of rest.

An example with 7 travelling reserves would be an overloaded game of 4 v 3 where the extra man is constantly attacking. The pitch dimensions would be ~40m length by ~30m width. Rules and constraints would be manipulated to keep the ball in play and encourage physical efforts, such as turnovers for big chase backs or extra points if every man gets a touch on the ball in the phase leading to a try.

The straight line running would be composed of two different ‘sets’, one which will help us accrue some higher velocity running which typically looks a bit like Bronco reps, and one which is designed to elicit a higher HR response where the W:R ratio is again skewed towards work and would look like 8 – 10 reps of a 25m run, going every 20 seconds.

When doing top-ups to prepare reserve players to step in as starters, how do you balance this with putting them at risk of spiking acute and chronic workload,  risk of injury etc?

This is the whole point of preparing like a starter. By making sure we ’top up’ players, we avoid the spikes in A:C workload.

What are the average training effects for a rugby match?

5 on both. It is a potent stimulus!

Do you use something like a weekly 5min submax test to monitor aerobic conditioning of your athletes?

In an ideal world, we would, we arent really afforded the time to do that and the time that we do have for physical development of qualities rather than monitoring.

Which test do you use to assess aerobic capacity?

We do a bronco in pre-season. We are aware it doesn’t measure aerobic capacity, but with a squad of 60 players, it can give us a good indication of the fitness of players and their ability to perform a high-stress activity.

Jake, for the TR players, will you feed how much red zone time a player has remaining for the week into the HoP GD -2 for game day top-ups or are your MD top-ups the same each week, then you work your in- week-top-ups around knowing that they will achieve a certain red zone time on a MD top ups?

We will keep on top of all durations during the week so we can appropriately top the players up. We’re fortunate that we will get an idea of the team selection early in the week so we can identify players to target.

Practical lessons for coaches

Several key themes emerged from the discussion with Bristol Bears:

• Keep communication simple for players

• Use a small number of trusted metrics before gradually introducing new ones

• Analyze peak match demands to guide training design

• Provide additional stimulus for non-selected players

By combining physiological data with practical coaching insight, teams can create training environments that are both data-informed and performance-driven.