How GPS helped Paul O’Connell win Six Nations player of the tournament at 35

When we got onto Paul O’Connell a few weeks back to see if he’d be up for taking part in The Irish Times Summer Nights festival, his reply was a slightly chilling yes, as long as we came up with an interesting enough topic. When we inevitably failed him on that score, he duly came up with one himself.

“I don’t think I’ve really talked about GPS anywhere before,” he said. “Towards the end of my career, GPS basically changed the whole way I trained and played. There might be something in that.”

There was. On Wednesday night, we Zoomed for an hour to an online audience of Irish Times readers as O’Connell gave us a brilliant insight into the last three years of his career. It started with a November international against Samoa in 2013. O’Connell had just turned 34 and was in the matchday 23 but wasn’t starting. He was itching to do some extra fitness work to make up for the game time he wouldn’t be getting on the weekend.

"So I said to Jason Cowman, who was the new S&C guy with Ireland, that I wanted to do an extra fitness session early in the week, maybe on the Tuesday. So he said sure and he gave me an outline of a session to do and I looked at it and said, 'Look, I'm not doing that at all'. It wasn't the kind of session that makes me feel good about myself.

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“And I told him what I had in mind, which was a 25-minute session where you’re crawling off the pitch at the end, where you get that buzz of having ended yourself almost. He said, ‘Okay, that’s fine. But you know, GPS has told us a lot about rugby. That kind of training has no real place in rugby any more’. And I said, ‘Look, it’s what I need’.

“I played the game then on the Saturday and ended up playing approximately the same amount of time as the fitness session had lasted. The following Tuesday, Jason came over to me with a piece of paper with a GPS comparison of the two sessions. And they were absolutely poles apart.

“The training session I did, I think I might have covered around six kilometres. Not a lot of fast running, not a lot of accelerations, not a lot of rest. Whereas the match had lots less running, it had way more accelerations, way more sprints and way more rest.

“He said, ‘You’re at a stage in your career, with all the surgeries you’ve had, where you need to manage the training you’re doing and to get as much bang for your buck from your training as possible. The sessions you’re doing yourself, that make you feel good and give you that buzz, they don’t apply to rugby. You need to make your training more like the 25 minutes against Samoa’.”

It changed O’Connell’s outlook on rugby more or less overnight. He knew he had a short number of years left and that his body needed him to start lightening the load. He’d had two back surgeries and the bones in his knees had worn down, leaving him in constant pain. Here, just in time, was a way for him to train less but do more that was relevant to the game and still find improvements.

He’d seen plenty of GPS stuff before, of course. For years, player stats had been posted on the wall after sessions for anyone who wanted to see them but this was the first time O’Connell had seen it broken down into granular detail. It gave him a new insight into how to train himself to do things he’d always wanted to previously.

“Even something like a line break. If a player makes a line break and you’re in his vicinity, chances are you’ll sprint with him because there’s a pass on for you. But if you look at a lot of Kiwi players, as soon as there’s a line break, every single one of them sprints upfield. They don’t sprint towards the ball, they sprint straight upfield in the hope that the ball will come their way eventually.

“I had never trained myself to do that properly. When Dougie Howlett arrived in Munster, he had that instinct. There was a game one time where I was running across the pitch to where the ball was and he was running directly up the pitch ready if the ball came out to him. And we collided in the middle of the pitch. He had a chat with me afterwards and basically said, ‘Mate, you need to be running to where the ball is going to be, not to where the ball is’.

“So I knew it, I just hadn’t been able to find a way to build it in as a habit. But now, any time there was a line break in training, I just tried to get a sprint effort into my GPS stats. It didn’t matter where I was, I just went for it. Or the same in defence, I would run directly back to get into the D line, try to win a race with myself and get a sprint effort into the stats rather than running over to where the ball was. Same with kick-offs and kick chases.

“I found that I can actually become a better rugby player with better habits by chasing some of the numbers on GPS. That’s what I started to do. I started making rugby training sessions into fitness sessions that were far more real for making me a better rugby player. They were far more real for making me rugby-fit as well and therefore I didn’t actually have to take an extra half an hour on top of the rugby session to do my fitness. It kept my load down and made me a better player. It was a revelation for me.”

Within 15 months of his chat with Cowman, O'Connell was the Player of the Tournament in the 2015 Six Nations. He was 35 at the time and is still the oldest player to have won the accolade. He's convinced it wouldn't have happened without GPS changing the way he saw the game.

The question that got the best answer all night came from Orlagh Doherty on Twitter, asking O'Connell what his thoughts were during his last game for Ireland, when he got badly injured in the World Cup win over France in Cardiff.

“You’d be surprised what goes through your head. A lot of it was pretty shallow thoughts. I was moving to Toulon after the World Cup and we had agreed to move into a beautiful house. We were going to rent it when I was there, it was a gorgeous house. And I remember lying on the ground in Cardiff thinking, ‘I’m never going to see that house. We’re never going to get living in it’. And I didn’t!”