LPM – Stage Pierre Villepreux

One week fully immersed in the LPM – Pierre Villepreux’s training method!

We decided to go down to Lubersac once again and enjoy the hospitality of Pierre and his fellow LPM coaches. Pierre is now in his eighties but does not seem to age and is still as passionated about rugby and this style of educating players as ever.

The LPM – Stage de Pierre Villepreux is a summercamp for all age groups that is run in Lubersac down in the beautiful French Correze region. Starting on Sunday afternoon with small games to group the players and ending with “Test Matches” on the Friday, you can watch the players train in during the week and see the development of their awareness on positioning in Open Play. In parallel Pierre Villepreux and David Hoarau run a coaching program to explain the method and voice over the exercises you see during the training sessions.

The Le Plaisir the Movement method

Pierre has done it thousands of times obviously, but let me try to explain the LPM method. Between Attack and Defense there is the relation where the Attackers have the Action with the Ball and the Defenders have to React. In the LPM method, those Actions and Reactions are manipulated in gamelike situations to create the Go Forward learning opportunity for the players. All the attackers have the responsibility to support the Ball Carrier in this Go Forward. Why? To continue to exploit the unbalance between Attack and Defence and keep the Defenders reacting to ever changing situations. How? That is all about adaptability.

Is this about the Tactical before Technical debate? Both are important but the LPM method is definitely creating that tactical learning situation. With simply introducing a second/new ball after a technical mistake or, when the Attack and Defense are balanced, the coach can keep the momentum and the Go Forward. (How, when and where was one of my learning goals for this week, this is really where you have to practise as a coach).

Easy to implement?

With some more guidelines from Pierre you are basically set to go! Next step is to go out on the pitch and practise this approach, using the various exercises we learned in this week. It is easy for the players who just have to do react and adapt to the situation but more difficult for us coaches to select and create the best learning situation.

Stade Toulousain – Rugby Toulouse

So why is not everybody onto this method? Many coaches think very little of the method, very frustrating for them that one of the most successful clubs in Europe has fully adopted the philosophy!

During the week we had the unique opportunity to lean about the Toulouse set-up when it was presented by Sam Lacombe – Coach of their Espoir team and Academy Manager. The focus is on that adaptability, initiative and speed in all the age groups and Pro-team.

I think the main reasons coaches do not like it are:

• We want to structure play according to what we think guarantees the outcome, not realising this Movement of Players approach is a method too and not something magical. In this thinking us coaches take care of the “Why” and belief the players only need to be concerned about the “How” (and then get angry when they mess up an easy overlap);
• We want instant results and it does take time to get this level of understanding between players. Too quickly we discard the method;
• It is difficult to be that ‘Game Master’ that Pierre wants us to be, giving guidance and “Plaisir” to the players, freedom to try, make mistakes and learn. We are taught as coaches to intervene and structure the learning process to abstract detail;

Not comparing myself to that Toulouse standard but …. with the National Under 18s we followed this approach and were very successful – promoted to Poule A with 16 of the players scoring tries in the three matches, a compliment to the quality and understanding of the movement in Open Play.

References

• The LPM website for the UK camp. Contact LPM and create an opportunity to bring this to your club and set-up a similar week, the LPM coaches are more than happy to present this to your club’s coaches and players!
• A presentation of Pierre explaining how to exploit the unbalance between Attack & Defense on my website;
• We talked about it but turns out that “Plaisir” is more than just “Pleasure”, look at Google Translate;
• Some tries on Youtube of Stade Toulousain – Toulouse – showcasing the free flowing rugby;
• Pierre Villepreux on wikipedia;
• David Hoarau on LinkedIn;
• Sam Lacombe on the Stade Toulousain website

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