’In our sport, we’re basically trying to rebuild an F1 car within five, six or seven days so it can perform at its peak’
Whatever the game-plan Rob Penney and his coaching staff have cooked up to beat Toulon tomorrow, you can be sure the head coach is relying on a supreme level of fitness and conditioning in his players with which to execute it.
Against a team of immense physicality and intensity in everything they do, Toulon represent the ultimate challenge of an opposition’s mental and physical strength and stamina and where Munster are concerned the job of keeping that at an optimum falls to the province’s new head of fitness Adam Trypas and his fellow strength and conditioning experts, Aidan O’Connell, Aled Walters, PJ Wilson and Will Douglas.
Trypas has only been in the job since January, joining Munster from Super League outfit Catalan Dragons to replace the highly regarded Bryce Kavanagh as Munster’s head of fitness when his fellow Australian returned home to work with Tony McGahan’s Melbourne Rebels.
He heads a team widely credited by Munster’s players for helping to transform them into a successful side, winning games late on this season they might not have done a year ago due to being stronger, fitter and faster.
Trypas says strength and conditioning only plays a part in that transformation but credits his predecessor and fellow strength and conditioners for their contribution, lauds the ferocity of the players in running Toulouse off their feet in the Heineken Cup quarter-final earlier this month and hopes it continues tomorrow in Marseille.
“If you’re team’s losing in the last 10 minutes and it happens more than once or twice, you know who people are blaming before anyone even says it,” Trypas told the Irish Examiner.
“You know they’re blaming fitness and we’d be the first as S&Cs to say ‘it’s this and this and this’.
“It’s the same with winning. It’s like having a glass of sand and taking out one grain and saying that’s the reason why we won. Yes, fitness may have something to do with it but it’s the culture as well. Sometimes when guys have that belief, not to panic, like that Perpignan game down there, not to panic but to say ‘right, we can re-settle, we can do this’, that usually does come from not feeling fatigued but it’s also a credit for what was done here in the pre-season and how they’ve looked after it since.
“There’s a phrase we have, ‘worst-case scenario’, more of a mental thing, where we want to put the boys into a place that they’ll never be on a field. So they know they’ll have felt worse than they actually feel at this point.
“You want them to go to that place. Look at the Toulouse game. I don’t know if Toulouse was willing to go to a place that our guys took them in those first five minutes, where it was just ridiculously fast and...
“I’m hoping that happens this weekend. Are we going to take Toulon to a place that they’ve never been before in terms of the ferocity and the speed and the relentlessness?”
Rugby chose Trypas rather than the other way round but when you grow up in the New South Wales hinterland of Sydney there is no escaping the National Rugby League code, particularly in his hometown of Newcastle.
A national-level weightlifter like his Greek-born father, Trypas’s local NRL club, the Newcastle Knights, brought him in as a 22-year-old to help with their gym work and a career was born.
“My father represented Australia as a weightlifter and his brother represented New South Wales in rugby league and Newcastle’s a rugby league town so we were brought up in those sports.
“Back in the mid-90s, heavy-type lifting hadn’t exploded like it has in the last three or four years and they came to me as I was really the only serious weightlifter in the area.”
After his stint with the Knights came a move to England and Super League side Wakefield Trinity Wildcats, then Japanese rugby union franchise Toyota and back to the Super League with the Catalan Dragons in Perpignan, from where he jumped at the opportunity to join Munster.
“Everyone knows who Munster is and when you talk to people here they don’t realise that. Everyone in Australia who’s involved in rugby or rugby league knows who Munster is, so to me it was a pretty big goal achieved to be in thisenvironment.
“So turning up here, I’ve seen in places before where people come in and say ‘right, it’s my way, we’re changing everything’ but to me you have to sit back and take a look at it. It was a successful organisation when I came in here doing some things very, very well so for me to come in halfway through a season and say I’m scrapping it all would not have done me or the players and staff already here any justice.
“It was a good programme and the S & C staff, Aidan O’Connell, Aled Walters, PJ Wilson, Will Douglas, they could work anywhere in the world on their own. So we’re pretty lucky that we’ve got four or five world-class people working in the one department.
“Everyone’s got their skill set and it’s just bringing those skill sets together and we rise even further.
“Sometimes the problem in our (S&C) industry is everyone trying to reinvent the wheel but you don’t need to. All we’re doing is just adding to it, that little bit more. It all goes in a circle and in five years’ time we might be saying ‘why were we doing this?’ but that’s just how it works.
“Some people try to make it rocket science to justify their existence or push their product but it’s not.
“There’s a lot of stuff that we’ll read or get sent through and you look at it say ‘yup, that’s pretty good in theory but you just can’t do that.”
“In our sport, we’re basically trying to rebuild a Formula One car within five, six or seven days so it can perform at its peak. That’s all we’re worried about. We can’t be mucking around with different new stuff to the detriment of getting our guys ready each week. We’re in week 43 of the season now.”
Clearly, though, each human body is different to another and that requires different ways to rebuild those F1 cars. Despite the wholesale embracing of technology such as the GPS monitors that collect data on 15 different points of a players’ movement and actions, from heart rates to distance covered and speed, Trypas insists good old-fashioned intuition plays as big a part as the reams of data at the Munster coaches’ fingertips.
And in a results-driven business such as professional rugby, marrying the two helps to resolve any conflict between getting players ready to go an win and looking after his long-term well-being.
“We’re in the process now of coming with our own Munster-specific, long-term athlete development model from schoolboy level on, which focuses on the development of players right through.
“The hardest thing with the long-term model is you might have five 15-year-olds and they’re all at different levels of maturity, both physically and mentally. So how do you train that? Some kids are ready, some aren’t, so that’s the holy grail of the long-term model. You can’t just have a cookie-cutter approach and say, ‘right, everyone’s going to do this’ because some 15-year-olds are still little boys while others are grown men.”
“Essentially, it’s about getting to know your athletes. Take someone like CJ Stander. He’s played the last four games and that’s where the intuition of the coaching staff, without even looking at the markers that they give us, we knew on Monday, we’re just going to rest him, he’s just going to do his recovery. He’s not going to do any weights, we’re just going to pull back on him a little bit. To me that’s the art of coaching and looking after these guys.
“There’s a place for intuition amongst all the science. We do look at a lot of GPS data but sometimes what’s there is right in front of our face.
“And a lot of times if they’re not playing we might try and mimic the physiological and physical stuff that they get in a game but you can never imitate that in training, as in the stresses that go into preparing for a game, whether it be a Rabo game or a Heineken Cup semi-final.
“For a young guy there’s going to be a lot of stress in his life. He might not sleep well, he’s got to be here at a certain time, there at a certain time. Those stresses are the things that cause the most amount of fatigue. So that’s the sort of stuff we’re trying, when we can, to take off the guys, that structure and stress around their life and educating them how to do it themselves as well rather than holding their hand with everything.
“We do everything for them that sometimes when they have to think for themselves they struggle. So that’s what we’re starting to do with the guys, ‘we’ll educate you and you can look after that’.
“One of the big themes I want to bring in to our long-term model is not just creating athletes, we want to create good people as well. We want them to be the best Munster player they can be but we also want them to be a good person so in the future, if kids want to come into our programme, their parents will know they’re going to be looked after physically and they’re going to turn our young boys into men, good people in the community, which has an effect on the whole culture of the place anyway.”
For Trypas and the rest of the Munster fitness staff, part of their remit to educate players means teaching them that there’s more to strength and conditioning than just lifting one and a half times your body weight.
“We don’t chase numbers. All the S&Cs here agree on that. If so and so can squat a massive weight here, it means nothing if they can’t control their body when they’re in movement. Sometimes as S&Cs we can get carried away and think we’re more important than we are. You can have guys that are phenomenal in the gym but just don’t have the skill or the nous on the field of play. And then you have guys that are weak in the gym and don’t move that well but they’re world-class players.
“Sometimes we think it’s all about us but it’s not, it’s all about rugby and the main thing about strength and conditioning is just keeping these guys on the field; just making them durable and being able to handle the ins and outs of probably the most brutal contact sport in the world.”
Munster head of fitness Adam Trypas can hear it already.... how does any of this stuff apply to the rest of us, the non-elite athletes, the club rugby guys and young hopefuls dreaming of one-day becoming professional? We asked him for five tips that can translate what he’s doing with Munster to us lesser mortals.
(1) “For that younger age group, don’t think it’s the be-all and end-all. There’s a big thing now not to go into early specialisation. And it’s a big one for parents — expose your kids to as many sports as possible.”
(2) “If you’re going down the road of personal trainers, do your research. As an American coach once said, ‘any fool can make another fool tired’. And that’s a big thing in the fitness industry at the moment, that beating the crap out of people is the sign of a good trainer. It’s not. You need someone who’s educated, that’s got a proven background.”
(3) “Keep as mobile and as flexible as possible. Don’t think that lifting heavy weights is going to make you the best at your sport. I heard a good quote, that the best lifters, you hardly ever see them miss because they know exactly where their thresholds are”.
(4) “Don’t think that the strength is the be all and end all, get down there with the ball in your hands and do as much of that as possible. The other stuff will come anyway.”
(5) “For guys playing club rugby, in particular, lifestyle is so important. I think that’s one of our biggest stresses on our society now, one of the biggest indicators of fatigue is stress. It’s not lack of sleep, it’s stress. Don’t make sport a stress, make it fun and enjoy it.”
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