For the past three years Sydney University Football Club has been operating an Elite Development Squad (EDS) program for its top grade and colts players. Utilising one of the best equipped gymnasiums in Australian rugby, players train for eleven months of the year and undertake four weights sessions per week off-season and a lesser number while playing.

The program's strength and conditioning components have been devised and administered by Martin Harland, a sports scientist who has previously worked with professional rugby league, Australian football and basketball teams. His programs for rugby players place a high degree of emphasis on basic strength development and rugby-specific fitness. A distinguishing feature of his approach is a concentration on heavy lower body work through exercises such as squats, deadlifts and cleans. In addition, both backs and forwards make intensive use of the MyoQuip ScrumTruk, a rugby-specific apparatus that targets the large mass leg extensor muscles, specifically the gluteal and quadriceps groups. Hypertrophy or increased muscle mass is a natural and not unintended by-product of such training.

Another distinctive feature of Martin Harland's rugby training regimen is his requirement that backs undertake the same rigorous basic strength routines as forwards. Many strength and conditioning coaches reserve the heavy "grunt" work for forwards, or even restrict it to the tight five.

Exposing backs to very serious weight training has produced a quite extraordinary outcome at Sydney University, as evidenced by comparing the body weights of their forwards and backs with those of the Wallabies and the four Australian Super 14 franchises, the ACT Brumbies, NSW Waratahs, Queensland Reds and Western Force.

Not surprisingly, the University's young forwards are outweighed by each of the five professional squads, 105.3 kilograms compared to 109.1 to 111.1 kilograms. However, in the backs the situation is reversed with the University players averaging 95.1 kilograms as opposed to 90.9 to 92.9 kilograms. Thus the Sydney University backs outweigh Australia's national and provincial squads by between 2.2 and 4.2 kilograms per man.