and people say that our lads dont have enough muscles in them
Training
36 posts
• Page 3 of 3 • 1, 2, 3
by account deleted by request » Sat Aug 09, 2008 11:44 pm
Fitter, stronger, faster
Today’s footballer is a highly tuned athlete, and that takes hard work
Jonathan Northcroft
All that’s missing is Davros and the Daleks. The “cryopod” looks, as it sounds, like something from Dr Who. Bus shelter-sized, it’s built with materials developed by Nasa and controlled from a steel podium from which sprouts a microphone and buttons marked ominously: “freezing”, “drying”, “lights”. Inside a “cryochamber” is chilled to -130C, a temperature that would freeze a person’s eyeballs after four minutes and kill them after five. Some believe athletes can boost recovery through exposure to extreme cold and players go into this vastly-priced machine naked apart from underwear, gloves, muffs and masks, and shiver for 30 seconds. “It makes the body think it’s dying, so it regenerates,” says Dave. “The lads don’t really use it.”
We are at Bolton Wanderers’ training ground at Euxton and Dave is its facilities man. Football has come quite a way since “recovery” involved the team bath and a fag. The cryopod, installed by his predecessor, Sam Allardyce, is not Gary Megson’s favourite device and use of it is optional but Megson is appreciative of other equipment he inherited at Bolton’s state-of-the-art centre and has been enhancing the place even further. His revamp includes a new canteen, improved IT and cardiovascular gear, to add to Euxton’s “endless pool” (a water tank where players exercise against a current), pilates studio and “tranquil room” where players are massaged under calming lights. “I’m not into ‘bull****-baffles-brains’ stuff but where science works, we embrace it,” says Megson. “There’s no substitute for hard work, though.”
Megson, who helped Bolton pull off an unlikely escape from relegation, has a reputation for producing fit, drilled teams and has put his squad through a forbidding few weeks to get them ready for a new Premier League campaign. “Some players says it was the worst pre-season they’ve done. By ‘worst’ they mean best, as in hardest,” Megson smiles. But how bad is good? The banner above the door through which Bolton’s players return from the training ground says “Have You Done Enough?” So what is “enough”? What, in 2008, prepares an athlete for campaigning in the toughest, fastest football league in the world?
Brian Prestidge, Bolton’s head of performance analysis, takes me through the ProZone stats. “The distances Premier League players cover have been going up gradually; the spectacular increase is in the high-intensity work they do every game. Over seven seasons we’ve seen Bolton players’ high-intensity activities rise 160%.
In 2007-08 they were up 27-28% on 2006-07,” he says. A “high intensity” action, be it a run, tackle or turn, is one performed at greater than 75% of sprinting speed. Workaholic midfielder Matt Taylor averaged around 1.7km per game at high intensity last season and in one match hit 2km out of a total of around 13km covered. Imagine it: the equivalent of an eight-mile run, with one and a quarter miles at near-sprinting pace, within a 90-minute game. “Bolton aren’t a huge club that can buy every player so we’ve got to ensure those aspects where we can compete, like fitness and mentality, are right,” Megson says. “If our spectators leave the ground saying, ‘The players weren’t good enough today’ you can accept that a bit, but if it’s, ‘The players cheated’, that’s a crime.”
Out on Euxton’s trim, green pitches, is a sight probably more chilling to Bolton players than the Cryopod: the boyish grin of Ade Stovell as he prepares to make someone’s lungs ache. Stovell, the fitness, strength and conditioning coach, is putting Blerim Dzemaili, a young Swiss international, through a fitness test. Dzemaili straps on a harness and performs shuttle sprints while pulling heavy weights. “Resistance training,” Stovell beams . It’s hard not to like this enthusiastic and indecently fit-looking 32-year-old, but popularity was not Stovell’s object when he devised the players’ summer regime. He’s an ex-RAF PTI. “I don’t mind players moaning as long as they do the work, though the difference in the military is you can do people for insubordination,” Stovell laughs. “Ultimately they’ll like you if you make them better athletes.”
When Graeme Souness was a young footballer he had a two-month Greek holiday comprising “beer for breakfast , whisky for lunch . . . and the nearest we came to keeping fit was dancing in the discos until dawn.” That was only 30 years ago but how things have changed. Even when heading for the beach after their 2007-08 exertions, Bolton players were issued an “off-season pack” by Stovell detailing a routine to keep them “ticking over”.
Two aerobic and one anaerobic excercises were expected to be done per week and a weights programme followed featuring press-ups, dips and pull-ups. “We measured weight, body fat and heart rates before they left and tested players on their return and the percentages didn’t drop much,” Stovell says. “If you went on benders and did no work you’d be found out but our lads are pretty switched on.” Pre-season began with ball games and cross-country runs; then came a training camp in Austria. The routine: breakfast, health supplements, massage, warm-up, fitness-focused ball work, lunch. Then one hour of circuit training and 35 minutes of running which went: sprint for 12sec, rest for four, sprint for 24sec, rest for four, sprint for 12sec, rest for four, repeat. Work for three minutes, rest 90sec, begin again. There were ice baths for all of the players before dinner and in the evening, to further recovery, they wore stockings and upper body “skins”.
“Off-season laid the base, Austria began building the fitness pyramid and players should peak against Stoke,” says Stovell.
Megson has been managing long enough to know about looking at the bigger picture. His side have a friendly against Wolves that day and apart from Gary Cahill and Fabrice Muamba nobody plays well, but the running is sharp and effort levels are fierce.
Other initial pre-season games were similar but Megson promises that now fitness is established and technical tuning will follow, performances will get better. So it proves. Some 72 hours later, with new £10m striker Johann Elmander scoring twice, Doncaster Rovers were destroyed 5-0. Last week came good displays on tour in Greece against Aris Thessaloniki and AEK Athens.
When it comes to industry and focus Megson leads by example, rising at 5.30am to leave his Sheffield home to be at Euxton for 7.15am. He had the place redecorated and recalls: “When I arrived at the club there was a quotation up on the wall that was the total antithesis of what I believe in. They’d got it
-backwards and it had to come down. ‘It’s not the result, it’s how you go about it that matters,’ it read. I said, ‘Make a new sign: just turn that quotation around’.”
According to Stovell “fitness-wise, at Premier level, footballers are in a league of their own. If you asked Joe Average or even military people to do the same work they couldn’t. No matter how fit they were, they wouldn’t have the speed or power.”
Megson agrees: “You can see by body shapes players are elite athletes nowadays. They have to be because the rewards of the Premier League are huge and there’s pressure upon everyone to stay part of it.
“Only one of our players has ‘issues’ and I’ve told him to address them because he’ll fall behind. Otherwise he’s a great lad and good enough to play for England.
“There’s no excuse for a modern player to be in the wrong condition. It can only be down to laziness and not being professional. Gone are the days when managers put up with it: if a player’s not doing it you just go out and get someone else who can.”
Fit for the big kick-off
Performance analysis is key to assessing a player’s condition and Bolton’s three-man department, led by Brian Prestidge, provide Gary Megson with data showing the output of every member of the squad. Each game is filmed and a DVD of it can be on Megson’s desk within two hours
Players are studied in blocks of five, 10 and 15 games to show if their fitness is varying over a season, and to ensure performance level is constant from the first minute to the 90th. Players are judged against their personal standards and against Premier League averages for their position These are (per game):
Defence the average Premier League centre-back runs 10km during a match, 700m at ‘high intensity’ (speeds above 75% sprint pace); full-backs run 10.8km (1.05km at high intensity).
Midfield central midfielders run 11.6k (1.1km high intensity); wide players run 11.6km, (1.3km high intensity).
Attack forwards run 10.5km (1.05km high intensity)
Wide midfielder Matt Taylor is one of Bolton’s fittest players and in one match he ran 13km, with 2km at high intensity – well above average for a player in his position
times online.
Today’s footballer is a highly tuned athlete, and that takes hard work
Jonathan Northcroft
All that’s missing is Davros and the Daleks. The “cryopod” looks, as it sounds, like something from Dr Who. Bus shelter-sized, it’s built with materials developed by Nasa and controlled from a steel podium from which sprouts a microphone and buttons marked ominously: “freezing”, “drying”, “lights”. Inside a “cryochamber” is chilled to -130C, a temperature that would freeze a person’s eyeballs after four minutes and kill them after five. Some believe athletes can boost recovery through exposure to extreme cold and players go into this vastly-priced machine naked apart from underwear, gloves, muffs and masks, and shiver for 30 seconds. “It makes the body think it’s dying, so it regenerates,” says Dave. “The lads don’t really use it.”
We are at Bolton Wanderers’ training ground at Euxton and Dave is its facilities man. Football has come quite a way since “recovery” involved the team bath and a fag. The cryopod, installed by his predecessor, Sam Allardyce, is not Gary Megson’s favourite device and use of it is optional but Megson is appreciative of other equipment he inherited at Bolton’s state-of-the-art centre and has been enhancing the place even further. His revamp includes a new canteen, improved IT and cardiovascular gear, to add to Euxton’s “endless pool” (a water tank where players exercise against a current), pilates studio and “tranquil room” where players are massaged under calming lights. “I’m not into ‘bull****-baffles-brains’ stuff but where science works, we embrace it,” says Megson. “There’s no substitute for hard work, though.”
Megson, who helped Bolton pull off an unlikely escape from relegation, has a reputation for producing fit, drilled teams and has put his squad through a forbidding few weeks to get them ready for a new Premier League campaign. “Some players says it was the worst pre-season they’ve done. By ‘worst’ they mean best, as in hardest,” Megson smiles. But how bad is good? The banner above the door through which Bolton’s players return from the training ground says “Have You Done Enough?” So what is “enough”? What, in 2008, prepares an athlete for campaigning in the toughest, fastest football league in the world?
Brian Prestidge, Bolton’s head of performance analysis, takes me through the ProZone stats. “The distances Premier League players cover have been going up gradually; the spectacular increase is in the high-intensity work they do every game. Over seven seasons we’ve seen Bolton players’ high-intensity activities rise 160%.
In 2007-08 they were up 27-28% on 2006-07,” he says. A “high intensity” action, be it a run, tackle or turn, is one performed at greater than 75% of sprinting speed. Workaholic midfielder Matt Taylor averaged around 1.7km per game at high intensity last season and in one match hit 2km out of a total of around 13km covered. Imagine it: the equivalent of an eight-mile run, with one and a quarter miles at near-sprinting pace, within a 90-minute game. “Bolton aren’t a huge club that can buy every player so we’ve got to ensure those aspects where we can compete, like fitness and mentality, are right,” Megson says. “If our spectators leave the ground saying, ‘The players weren’t good enough today’ you can accept that a bit, but if it’s, ‘The players cheated’, that’s a crime.”
Out on Euxton’s trim, green pitches, is a sight probably more chilling to Bolton players than the Cryopod: the boyish grin of Ade Stovell as he prepares to make someone’s lungs ache. Stovell, the fitness, strength and conditioning coach, is putting Blerim Dzemaili, a young Swiss international, through a fitness test. Dzemaili straps on a harness and performs shuttle sprints while pulling heavy weights. “Resistance training,” Stovell beams . It’s hard not to like this enthusiastic and indecently fit-looking 32-year-old, but popularity was not Stovell’s object when he devised the players’ summer regime. He’s an ex-RAF PTI. “I don’t mind players moaning as long as they do the work, though the difference in the military is you can do people for insubordination,” Stovell laughs. “Ultimately they’ll like you if you make them better athletes.”
When Graeme Souness was a young footballer he had a two-month Greek holiday comprising “beer for breakfast , whisky for lunch . . . and the nearest we came to keeping fit was dancing in the discos until dawn.” That was only 30 years ago but how things have changed. Even when heading for the beach after their 2007-08 exertions, Bolton players were issued an “off-season pack” by Stovell detailing a routine to keep them “ticking over”.
Two aerobic and one anaerobic excercises were expected to be done per week and a weights programme followed featuring press-ups, dips and pull-ups. “We measured weight, body fat and heart rates before they left and tested players on their return and the percentages didn’t drop much,” Stovell says. “If you went on benders and did no work you’d be found out but our lads are pretty switched on.” Pre-season began with ball games and cross-country runs; then came a training camp in Austria. The routine: breakfast, health supplements, massage, warm-up, fitness-focused ball work, lunch. Then one hour of circuit training and 35 minutes of running which went: sprint for 12sec, rest for four, sprint for 24sec, rest for four, sprint for 12sec, rest for four, repeat. Work for three minutes, rest 90sec, begin again. There were ice baths for all of the players before dinner and in the evening, to further recovery, they wore stockings and upper body “skins”.
“Off-season laid the base, Austria began building the fitness pyramid and players should peak against Stoke,” says Stovell.
Megson has been managing long enough to know about looking at the bigger picture. His side have a friendly against Wolves that day and apart from Gary Cahill and Fabrice Muamba nobody plays well, but the running is sharp and effort levels are fierce.
Other initial pre-season games were similar but Megson promises that now fitness is established and technical tuning will follow, performances will get better. So it proves. Some 72 hours later, with new £10m striker Johann Elmander scoring twice, Doncaster Rovers were destroyed 5-0. Last week came good displays on tour in Greece against Aris Thessaloniki and AEK Athens.
When it comes to industry and focus Megson leads by example, rising at 5.30am to leave his Sheffield home to be at Euxton for 7.15am. He had the place redecorated and recalls: “When I arrived at the club there was a quotation up on the wall that was the total antithesis of what I believe in. They’d got it
-backwards and it had to come down. ‘It’s not the result, it’s how you go about it that matters,’ it read. I said, ‘Make a new sign: just turn that quotation around’.” According to Stovell “fitness-wise, at Premier level, footballers are in a league of their own. If you asked Joe Average or even military people to do the same work they couldn’t. No matter how fit they were, they wouldn’t have the speed or power.”
Megson agrees: “You can see by body shapes players are elite athletes nowadays. They have to be because the rewards of the Premier League are huge and there’s pressure upon everyone to stay part of it.
“Only one of our players has ‘issues’ and I’ve told him to address them because he’ll fall behind. Otherwise he’s a great lad and good enough to play for England.
“There’s no excuse for a modern player to be in the wrong condition. It can only be down to laziness and not being professional. Gone are the days when managers put up with it: if a player’s not doing it you just go out and get someone else who can.”
Fit for the big kick-off
Performance analysis is key to assessing a player’s condition and Bolton’s three-man department, led by Brian Prestidge, provide Gary Megson with data showing the output of every member of the squad. Each game is filmed and a DVD of it can be on Megson’s desk within two hours
Players are studied in blocks of five, 10 and 15 games to show if their fitness is varying over a season, and to ensure performance level is constant from the first minute to the 90th. Players are judged against their personal standards and against Premier League averages for their position These are (per game):
Defence the average Premier League centre-back runs 10km during a match, 700m at ‘high intensity’ (speeds above 75% sprint pace); full-backs run 10.8km (1.05km at high intensity).
Midfield central midfielders run 11.6k (1.1km high intensity); wide players run 11.6km, (1.3km high intensity).
Attack forwards run 10.5km (1.05km high intensity)
Wide midfielder Matt Taylor is one of Bolton’s fittest players and in one match he ran 13km, with 2km at high intensity – well above average for a player in his position
times online.
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by account deleted by request » Sun Aug 10, 2008 12:33 am
Number 9 wrote:Bolton fest???
What are you stating Saint and what inclusion towards LFCs season ahead may it offer?
Its not just about Bolton mate, its about the high fitness levels that todays footballers need to achieve. Rafa is just as "clued up" on modern fitness methods as anyone at Bolton.
Sammy Lee has just left Bolton anyway.
I just thought it was an interesting read Barry
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- Joined: Sun Apr 30, 2006 5:11 am
36 posts
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