O’Connell highlights importance of pre-season

Paul O’Connell kept his audience spellbound at the University of Limerick this week.

No, he wasn’t regaling us with tales from episodes in the colours of Young Munster, Munster, Ireland and the Lions. Nothing like that.

Instead, he was on what has now become a hobbyhorse for the vast majority of rugby’s leading players — how they can get the best out of their pre-season to be fully ready when the action gets going in earnest in the autumn.

There was a time in the amateur era when even those of international stature did little or nothing in May, June and July before gradually easing their way back on to the training pitch in the middle of August. Recall those days to O’Connell, a man just a few months off his 35th birthday, and he smiles.

“It makes a massive difference,” he insists about modern preparation.

“When I look back on the years I played my best rugby in 2005, ’06, ’08, the year of the World Cup, they are all down to big pre-seasons. Certainly for my position anyway. Go into the backs or go into the front row and there are different skill sets but for a second row, it’s such a work rate position where you are trying to accumulate tackles, ball carries, hit rucks, roll mauls and so on.

“You need to have that big work load done in the summer to be able to accumulate that work load in the games themselves. As Jason Cowman (IRFU Strength and Conditioning coach) keeps saying to us, ‘the more pre-seasons you can accumulate over the years the better you tend to be’.”

We have all known players over the years who tried to pull the wool over the eyes of their trainers and coaches but the modern-day professional knows they wouldn’t get away with it.

“The big thing is the monitoring,” he stresses. “There are certain kilometres or certain metres you are trying to hit each week whereas that probably wasn’t measured as much in years past.

“You just got out there and got beasted and worked really hard. There is probably a lot to be said for that as well but at my age it is nice to have what you are doing monitored, to be able to step things up.

“When I am on my feet it’s to get as much bang for my buck as I possibly can so there isn’t as much pressure on the joints. Whereas in the past I might have been on my feet four, maybe five times a week, I’m only on my feet maybe two or three times a week this pre-season and I do a little bit of training off-feet as well. And it’s working for me.

“It’s much the same as last year. The watt bike is still being used! That’s a torturous machine. I suppose it’s really rugby-specific, it’s short, sharp bursts and again everything is monitored. You can compete with other guys on it in terms of wattages and times and it’s been a big tool for me that when other guys are on the pitch I can do a lot of work on it.

“The GPS monitoring allows the strength and conditioning staff to see exactly what you are doing and it’s a little bit more controlled as well. When I came back when I was very young, I would have been eager in week one to get into the thick of it as hard as I could but now it’s been a gradual progression over the first four fitness sessions.

“I’d say they have learned a lot from the past in terms of how they accumulated and picked up injuries. I suppose by managing that and knowing exactly what we are doing week-to-week, they are able to avoid injuries and that is probably the big difference.”

And if you think it stops at that, you’d be very wrong. Nothing but nothing is left to chance.

“We have an app on our phone and every morning you have to fill in where you are with your various numbers, weights, stretches and it contributes to keeping more guys fit and healthy,” O’Connell says.

And yet he has no intention of overdoing things either.

“There are full days where we have two sessions in a day and I’m lucky enough that I don’t have to do those yet,” he says. “I know I need to be careful what I do. I had a little bit of that this week where I stepped back a little bit and did a bit of work with the physio instead. That has been a little bit of a learning curve for me because I have injured myself trying to push myself in training in the past and for me getting the two big fitness sessions in each week is the big important thing and just making sure I stay injury free.

“I think I played something like 24 or 25 games last year. If I can put in a good pre-season on top of that, stay fit throughout the season as well, I think I will be in a very good shape.”