THE IRELAND PRE-SEASON: As the laws of rugby evolve and put new demands on payers, Gerry Thornleylooks at how the Ireland squad prepare for a tough season ahead.
AN IRUPA golf tournament at Elm Park the week before last afforded some of the Leinster and Ireland players a welcome reprieve from the rigours of pre-season training. Girvan Dempsey emerged the winner from a field also including Brian O'Driscoll but so exhausted were they, and so keen were they to conserve energy even on a short, flat course, that the players drove carts between shots.
Recently retired, Keith Gleeson accepts he may miss the rugby when the games kick-off.
"But I certainly don't miss the pre-season," he said. "It's not a nice period. You're basically eating, sleeping and drinking rugby, and you're a grumpy grouch. You're tired after every session yet you've got to back it up in the next session all week.
"It's the time of the year when you have no games at the weekend and therefore should have more time for your wife or girlfriend, and it must be particularly hard on players who have young kids. Because instead of going off somewhere for the day on a Saturday or Sunday, your body is so fatigued all you want to do is rest or sleep."
Coming off the back of a 53-week season for the majority of the Irish front-liners - and into a season that culminates in a Lions tour - compromises have had to be made. For starters, the Ireland A players who went to the Churchill Cup in America took only three weeks' holidays so as to begin pre-season on July 14th.
A further compromise - albeit as part of the new-found harmony between the national and provincial set-ups - has seen the 10-week pre-season of the last World Cup cycle reduced to seven so the provinces can start the Magners League more or less at full-strength.
The IRFU's national director of fitness, Dr Liam Hennessy, maintains this can be sufficient, though it effectively means trying to cram 10 weeks' work into seven.
Hennessy is fond of likening pre-season to building the foundations of a house. At its simplest, pre-season training focuses on strength/conditioning and aerobic/speed/stamina to ensure enough of both to last a season.
The almost daily gym sessions have seen an increased emphasis on power work, with plenty of the clean-and-jerk lifting one can watch in the Olympics along with squats, upper-power body-building and core body-building exercises, primarily to add muscle.
Each player is programmed individually, with players doing five or six weights sessions a week, mixed with three or four onfield running sessions along with a couple of skills sessions.
Each player has his own likes and dislikes.
"I never minded the gym work," says Gleeson, "but I hated the high-intensity running work. Those guys who are naturally quick get through the high-intensity running work that bit easier at times. They still hurt but they never have to use quite as much energy as some other guys would. That was my weakness. I hated the running work whereas I know some guys who could get through the running work but hated the gym."
The days of running up and down sand dunes or hills and players vomiting are over, for as the game has changed so has the emphasis on repetitive sprints, anything from 10 metres to 400 metres, with shorter breaks.
"It's not pleasant," says Gleeson.
"In my experience, when one of the guys dropped out, you dropped out as well, but you don't want to be the first to drop out," he adds, laughing, "and I knew in my heart that there were guys thinking the exact same thing."
Yet coming from the Australian module in the Southern Hemisphere, after seven seasons in Ireland he doesn't see the discrepancies that used to exist.
"Certainly my last three seasons with Leinster were exceptionally well organised pre-seasons. Without a doubt I probably got the most benefit out of those seasons because they were a little bit longer, and they were much better organised than what had possibly gone on before, barring Matt Williams's first year or two.
"The game has evolved a lot and the provinces have recruited well in terms of their sports-science people and their trainers. I'd have to say that the last couple of pre-seasons with Leinster have been up there with the best of what's about and by all accounts what they're doing again this year is second to none."
But compounding this year's shortened pre-season is the effect of the game's law changes, otherwise known as the ELVs.
The evidence the IRFU have is that the ball is in play longer and players are required to make more tackles per game and cover more ground.
"It doesn't mean we steer too much away from the strength base that you really need, because remember that in order to produce those tackles and more of them, you've still got to be a very strong player," says Hennessy.
"What we're emphasising now more is the aerobic nature - and multi-sprint, multi-repetition nature - of the game as a consequence of the ball being in play longer, and more movement, to defend and to counterattack."
This hasn't meant the Ireland players are running more; rather the intensity of the training has been heightened.
"For example, when we were out on the pitch last week, every player's heart rate was monitored closely," says Hennessy. "Our goal now has moved, so that every player, for 60 minutes, was getting to at least 80 per cent of his maximum heart rate during the pitch sessions."
Given every player's work-rate in matches will have to increase significantly, and to ensure the players will be capable of this, they are now being monitored individually much more closely.
To this end, Hennessy and co have introduced what are called yo-yo tests, whereby players accelerate for 20 metres, turn and accelerate back 20 metres. Taking a 10-second break, the players keep repeating the process until they can no longer maintain that speed.
The work doesn't stop with the pre-season, and Hennessy is at pains to emphasise the even greater importance of recovery time in between matches.
"You can't afford to do a lot of work in between games if recovery is taking priority, because they'll wind up in the next game more fatigued and that accumulates over the season. So you've got to be very, very careful with your work volume when you are actually in season."
Over the duration of a season, this has already been happening. In last week's 45-man, five-day get-together in Cork under the new Ireland coaching ticket, the skills sessions on the pitch were of 71, 88 and 106 minutes' duration. But in the build-up to their Heineken Cup knock-out matches, Munster would not have trained on the pitch for more than 120 minutes in one week, a figure that was reduced further in the weeks of Ireland's end-of-season tour games.
Hennessy's biggest source of frustration is the lack of a mid-season break, à la the Southern Hemisphere.
Ironically, as has been the case for several years now, the only opportunity a player may have to work on his fitness mid-season is if he's injured. So it is that one often finds a player who comes back from injury finishes the season stronger, fitter and above all fresher, provided he is worth the investment of a few difficult comeback games. Paul O'Connell's end-season string of tour de force performances through the knock-out stages of the Heineken Cup last term was a classic case in point.
This leads to another vexed issue: the number of games players play per season. While the demands, per game, are increasing, the schedule remains largely the same, hence the issue of rotating players becomes even more important.
"I know it's a cliche," admits Hennessy, "but the micro-management of the players in the provinces becomes even more important, and communication is at the basis of that. The dovetailing of the new national management and the provinces is critical, and it's been good to see that happening as we speak. There's great communication going on there," he said, perhaps pointedly.
Hennessy doesn't believe Irish rugby has had an issue with the conditioning of the players in recent times - and the evidence of last term's end-season and the generally low injury profile would tend to support that view. Yet fitness can only take a team so far.
Interestingly, the evidence from Australian Rules (and Hennessy has no reason to believe rugby union is any different) is that the most successful teams remain the most efficient teams, not the fittest.
"In other words, the teams that have to work the hardest on the pitch tend to be the teams that may be the least efficient when they have the ball."
Pending their own research into this, Hennessy believes there is a misconception out there that in order to be the best you have to be the fittest. More pertinently, in order to be the best you have to be the most efficient. Indeed, the statistics from the Tri-Nations repeatedly show the teams with the most possession have lost.
The underlying message from the new Irish management is that how effective a team tackles and how efficiently it wins the ball and uses it will be more important than ever.
Hennessy has no doubt that Munster were as fit as any team in the Heineken Cup but equally that they were ultimately the most efficient, not that they were bigger or stronger.
He cites a statistic from one of the IRFU's studies some years ago.
"The strongest team in Europe, we reckoned, were Connacht. Strength-wise and size-wise they were just phenomenal. So that gives you an example that you've got to be very careful on this issue of fitness."
To that end, actual ball work and rugby-related training is being introduced increasingly earlier in pre-season and by now, in week six, the mostly new coaching staffs are being granted more squad/skills sessions.
That hasn't made the pre-seasons any easier. But being flogged now is a necessary evil with another long season ahead, albeit on the premise that, like never before, the players can't keep being flogged.
An average pre-season week
MONDAY
Morning: Running/skills sessions (90 minutes)
Afternoon: Gym session (an hour)
TUESDAY
Morning: track/speed and skills session (90 minutes)
Afternoon: Gym session (an hour)
WEDNESDAY
Morning: Gym session followed by boxing/tug-of-war/aerobic session (90 minutes)
Afternoon: rest
THURSDAY
Morning: Running/skills session (90 minutes)
Afternoon: Gym session (an hour)
FRIDAY
Morning: Gym or skills/game/fitness session - depending on player's needs (90 minutes)
Afternoon: Running/skills session (an hour)
SATURDAY
Morning: Gym or skills session
Afternoon: off
SUNDAY
Rest day
