A few weeks into the championship and what has really stood out for me is the physique of the players in the top teams. Not just the likes of Patrick McBrearty who has clearly bulked out over the winter. But even someone like Tomás Ó Sé, who I’ve never seen in better shape. He’s lifting off the ground and it’s only the first week of June. The game is changing every year, and for everybody.

When Colm Cooper came on to the Kerry team in 2002, I might run into him the odd time and he'd have a bottle of Coke and a bag of crisps in his hands. Now I see him walking down the street in Tralee at lunchtime and it's water and a banana. He turned 30 last weekend and even now, after 11 years playing for Kerry, he's still making his body stronger, harder and bigger.

Players are brutes
All across the country, the players are brutes now. This hasn't happened suddenly but it's more noticeable than ever this summer now that we've seen all the big teams. Strength and conditioning is the be all and end all and work rate is prized above everything.

At one point in the game against Waterford last Saturday, the Gooch made a block down in his own full-back line. There’s something gone wrong with the game if that’s what we have somebody like him doing. It doesn’t look right, it doesn’t feel right.

And yet it has been coming a long time. I remember getting ready to play Cavan in the All-Ireland semi-final in 1997. Martin McHugh was over them at the time and they were seen as a bit of a coming team. They had this short handpassing style and had won the Ulster Championship with it so we had to work out what we were going to do against it. That meant training sessions where you gathered everybody into a confined space and you tackled and tackled and tackled. You’d be panned out after it.

And obviously fitness has always been a pre-requisite. Even as far back as when I was starting out. On the Tuesday night after we beat Tipperary in 1994, we had a savage session. And it wasn’t the sort of savage session we had been looking forward to. We had a few weeks until the Cork game and tradition would have been a gentle enough bit of training and then a nice few beers afterwards as the sun set.

But instead what we got was 13 laps of Fitzgerald Stadium, each of them to be done in a minute and 15 seconds or under. You had a minute and 15 seconds to recover between laps and then you had to go again. This was what we thought was the best practice of the time. We had no mind for beers after it, that's for sure.

Working hard
It's funny, the training and fitness work stayed the same for a long time. And it was one thing that I actually quite enjoyed. I liked working hard, I liked digging in for the long runs and the countless laps. There was a sand-track around one of the club pitches in Killarney and over the course of an eight-lap run, I took great pleasure in lapping the likes of Dara Ó Cinnéide, Barry O'Shea and John Crowley. I'd skip past them going, "Keep the head up lads, ye're doing well." And then away off laughing.

It all changed when Pat Flanagan came in under Jack O'Connor in 2006. He changed things dramatically because his ideas were all about short runs, snappy sessions. He told us that it would get us fit enough for 2006 but that if we kept to his programme we would peak in 2009. In fairness to him, that's how it turned out.

Poor Cinnéide was retired by the time Pat’s stuff really kicked in – I’d say the shorter stuff would have appealed to him. On the other hand, I was never all that mad keen on doing the weights. It was something you had to buy into en bloc or not at all but I had this sort feeling in my head that if I did too many of them, it would slow me down.

I felt that as a midfielder, I was probably strong enough and if I was going up against the likes of Anthony Tohill I had to be mobile rather than too bulky. But I rowed in and did them. Or did some of them anyway.

When I think of it now, we were fairly innocent about most things. Even simple things like diet and pre-match meals. In the ’90s, we’d often have a cup of tea and a few white bread sandwiches before a game, which is just about the worst thing you can do.

Nowadays, every schools footballer knows that if they’re playing a game at two in the afternoon, they’re sitting down to a plate of pasta and chicken at 10 in the morning. And that’s whether you’re hungry or not, whether you like it or not.

Everything is so different now. I've been with the Kerry Under-21s over the winter and the thing that really strikes me players of that age now is how clued in they are. I knew very little at that age other than I wanted to play for Kerry and I was going to do what I was told. They're so far ahead of what we were at that age, even what we were when were a bit older than them. They know that their body has to be taken care of, they're mad for information about what weights they should be doing and so on.

Intercounty demands
The intercounty game demands that from them. They look at a team like Donegal and they see players that are made of rock. Neil McGee took a hit off Stephen O'Neill a couple of weeks ago and O'Neill bounced off him. McGee didn't bat an eyelid.

Later in the game, McBrearty made that run for the second goal and was well able to fend off the tackle from Martin Penrose on the endline, as well as protect the ball into the bargain. That’s at just 19 years old.

It changes the game. It has to. These players work so hard on their physique that they just invite contact, to test out the work that they’ve done. And their management have got them into this shape for a reason. It’s to suit the gameplan they’ve come up with.

Donegal’s success has shown the way for counties to try and imitate. Are they the most skilful team that ever played?

No they’re not. They have some very good players and a few very skilful ones but the big thing they’ve bought into is work-rate and physicality. They fight for every edge and they are tactically very aware. I like a lot of what they do – with the exception of the way they try to get opposition players sent off at times – and they’re going to be very hard to stop again this year. They will be going in games long after other teams have given up the ghost.

One of our young fellas in the Kerry under-21 squad there a while ago was looking to swap a jersey with one of the McGee lads up in Donegal.

I’m fairly sure it was Eamon rather than Neil but I can’t be certain. We arranged it through a third party and our lad sent his jersey up and soon enough the Donegal jersey landed down in the post. When he opened it up, it was size medium.

I would imagine now that whenever any Donegal player gets asked for a jersey, they always send a medium. They’ve put in so much work that they’ve hardly any use for them anymore. Same goes for players in most counties. They’re big boys all over now and it doesn’t look like changing for the foreseeable future.