Rusi Tuima: 'It suits my frame, the size, I can use my weight'

Rusi Tuima is quite the powerful rugby unit, positionally transformed in the Exeter second row and on the fringes with Steve Borthwick’s England. It’s quite the change from lockdown and the copious amounts of his mother’s wholesome home cooking in nearby Plymouth.

Back then, the back-rower was very much surplus to Rob Baxter’s requirements as a seasoned Chiefs squad was in the business of collecting trophies, not giving youth its fling. The pendulum has swung the other way since then and the rebuild is looking to start generating headlines from the September 21 home league game versus Leicester and on into winter.

Tuima can’t wait. He looked a rude picture of health the other week when he pulled up a pew at a Sandy Park function room following the Chiefs’ opening training session in front of fans optimistic that the club is definitely on its way back to genuinely challenging for trophies again.

Having served a lengthy apprenticeship where he featured in just seven Gallagher Premiership games across multiple seasons, an important chat last summer with assistant Rob Hunter became a game-changer. After 11 league appearances last term and a half-dozen more in Europe, Tuima is now looking to play even more of a part this time around.

Casting his mind back to that fateful role-changing chat, he recalled: “I didn’t know it was coming. I was working through the pre-season, playing in the back row, and Rob Hunter came to talk to me. ‘What’s your thoughts on playing in the second row?’

“At this point, I was sort of like five seasons in, I just wanted to play rugby. I just said, ‘Yeah, I’d do anything at this point to get on the pitch’. From then on I have moved and enjoyed learning the trade. It’s quite a dark place to put your head into certain things but yeah, it has been good. Enjoying the challenge.

“I’ve got that year in the bank now and did a lot better than I thought I was going to, to be fair, playing in that position. I just think that the style I play and my frame, second row suits that, and with the new boys coming in this season, I’d like to show them what we are all about. I have been here for six seasons now, you want to keep on pushing through.”

It was in the Premiership Cup, the tournament played last season at a time when most English rugby eyes were firmly focused on the progress of Borthwick’s team at the Rugby World Cup, when Tuima encountered the lightbulb moment that convinced him his positional switch from back to second row was right up his street.

“It was after the first few pre-season games, the Prem Cup games where I was like, ‘You know what, I’m actually adding value to the team’. That was the big eye-opener for me where I was like. ‘It’s actually not too different to the back row. You still get to carry the ball, you still get to make your tackles’. Yeah, that was it for me.

“It was pretty easy. Because I have been around the set-up for how many years now, I understand the lineout calls, I understand the way we do things. For me in my role when I was an eight, I was out in the backs so I didn’t have to worry too much about the lineout calls, having to do the mauling and all that stuff.

“So the biggest difference for me was learning the lineout calls and then the plays after it. It was quite easy to adapt to. I had Rob (Hunter, forwards coach) and Ross (McMillan, scrum coach) there guiding me through last season; it was pretty easy to get my head around.

“It's a bit more impactful but it sort of suits me and my frame, the size sort of thing. I can use my weight to get a maul moving forward, get a scrum moving forward alongside my teammates. I have enjoyed it, to be fair. It’s a lot more nitty gritty than getting the glory of scoring tries and you get a bit of a joy out of doing that stuff.”

Let’s talk about size, the physical presence that earned the 24-year-old Tuima his contract extension through to the summer of 2026, a call-up to play for England A versus Portugal last February and selection for pre-tour training before Borthwick and his senior national squad departed in June for Japan and New Zealand.

“I’m about 129kgs,” he said, stating his current fighting weight heading into the new 2024/25 season. “Lockdown wasn’t my proudest moment, 138, 140. I went home. Home is very comfortable and I got a bit comfortable and the thing for me was not knowing what was happening next. I got into a bit of a rut, just going through the motions, and it was a bit of a flick in the ear coming back into training.”

What was his weakness? “Chop suey, Fijian style cooking. Mum’s a great cook and she never failed to feed us… Plymouth is home for me and my family. It's just down the road, Dangerously close,” he chuckled.

So, how has Tuima gotten from there to here where his body is now a temple and nutritional science dominates to ensure he became a must-pick on-pitch menace? “It comes down to conditioning. I have a big frame, a lot of weight to carry around. It’s just getting those repeated actions throughout the course of 80 minutes and just being fit enough to do that.

“This pre-season has been more about cutting down calories. Calorie deficit. It’s basically just making sure you are burning more calories than you are putting in and with that the science behind it, you end up losing weight. Fat that is. That’s my goal at the minute, to strip that down and hopefully make the running load easier.

“In playing weeks you need to find the balance between starving yourself and fuelling yourself – that was the big learning thing for me last year. Instead of coming into training feeling lethargic it was fuelling to train and then cutting down towards the evening where I won’t be doing anything.

“I taper down my meals during the day. Breakfast would be pretty average size. Sometimes I would cut my breakfast completely just to get that calorie deficit, and then lunch would be a biggish size meal but ready to train. Then dinner would be very light.

“I don’t really track (calories from meal to meal). For me, I weigh in every morning, see if I’m up or down and if I’m down I’m doing something right; if I’m up then I know probably from the day before I have gone a bit too heavy at dinner. That is kind of the way I go day by day.

“After last season as well I realised playing week in, week out you do pick up knocks and it’s how you then come back from that. Like, your recovery is so key to be able to come back out and play again the week after and keep that performance at the same level.

“So for me it was getting that recovery bit right and not going home and sitting down with my son and my missus, just to keep moving, keep stretching, whereas when I was 18 I’d just be like train, go home, sleep for a bit. The biggest change was getting that recovery right.”

As mentioned, Tuima’s progress hasn’t gone unnoticed with Borthwick’s England wanting a look. The head coach wasn’t involved in-person for last February’s A game in Leicester; it was the same week as the Six Nations match away to Scotland. But he heavily influenced things from afar and the newly-converted lock was then rewarded with a June invite to train with the seniors.

“In camp for that week you were surrounded by some of the best players in the (Prem) comp, so it was a good eye-opener to be in that environment. You get the calls and the system taught to you and without Steve being there, what he pushes is internalised in there as well so it was a very good eye-opener,” he explained of his A game involvement before switching to events four months down the tracks.

“I was lucky enough to be invited to the camp before they went on summer tour so I spent two weeks in camp. I’d the likes of Manny (Immanuel Feyi-Waboso), Ethan (Roots) and Greg (Fisilau). That just helped me be comfortable in that environment.

“His (Borthwick’s) words to me were my repeated actions, keep them going. Like your next job, what is it, and get on with it sort of thing. He likes to push your super strengths and mine being carrying, offloading, and then he also needs you to do a lot of work on your super strengths.”