‘Restricting grown-ups from alcohol is not normal’
Renowned S&C coach Kirszenstein warns of dangers of GAA players bulking up too fast and chasing ‘super fitness’ as he opens up on his recipe for sporting success
LEADING strength and conditioning coach Lukasz Kirszenstein has condemned the demonising of alcohol within the GAA and the Polish native is adamant that the imposition of drink bans is “creating a massive issue,” WRITES MICHAEL VERNEY
Kirszenstein, who has helped Tipperary (2016) and Galway (’17) to All-Ireland SHC success and still works closely with the Tribesmen, believes that “restricting grown-ups is not normal” and that such an approach promotes binge drinking.
“It’s a part of the culture and it’s actually creating a massive issue because if you restrict something for a long time, you fall into binge situations and the lads go bananas when the whole thing is lifted,” Kirszenstein told the Irish
Independent.
“Would I blame them? No. County set-ups are stressful enough. They’ve huge weight on their shoulders and you’re going without the ability to switch off and blow off a bit of steam, that just creates a funny environment.
“That, for me, is wrong. The problem is that it’s gone so far how do you manage to return to some normality? It’s not normal, restricting grown-ups. I don’t really get that.
“Alcohol and performance don’t really mix well from a sports science point of view, but if someone is kept into a certain type of bubble that they can’t really blow off a bit of steam then when they eventually can, they just go mad.”
HE MAY have been a key in back-toback All-Ireland SHC victories with Tipperary (2016) and Galway (’17) but the first theory which Lukasz Kirszenstein wants to debunk is that he is some kind of fitness guru. Kirszenstein has built an almost mythical status as a strength and conditioning coach within sporting circles but the Polish native has no interest in massaging his own ego and breaks down his own simple recipe for success in a rare interview.
“We’ve been presented as gurus and it doesn’t really work like that, I don’t feel like a guru anyway. I would like to think I just get on well with people and I really respect players and that’s probably why people appreciate me so much,” he tells the Irish Independent.
“I just know I train people and I know there’s stuff in books in terms of sports science and training methods but I also know there’s also real life and I just try to apply the real life story to the whole thing.
“People think if you’re super fit then you’re going to beat them all, I wish it would be that simple.
“You’re hearing stories about S&C coaches and this and that and how important they are. We are important but we’re not that important. Our primary role is to keep the players on the pitch and create headaches for a manager to pick from a full squad, that’s it.”
Kirszenstein’s knowledge cuts through the noise and gets straight to the point with the odd expletive thrown in for good measure having settled seamlessly into Irish life since making Limerick – where he lives with his partner Kama – his new home in 2004.
Lifted
The Munster Rugby Academy and Clare’s minor hurlers are among a stellar coaching CV underpinned by a remarkable rapport with players having also worked with the Irish women’s rugby team that lifted the 2015 Six Nations.
Micheál Donoghue realised the extent of Kirszenstein’s talents when working under Eamon O’Shea in Tipperary and coaxed him to the Galway fold just weeks after he helped the Premier to All-Ireland success in what was a notable coup for the Tribe boss.
The west was awake less than 12 months later as a 29-year gap was bridged with Kirszenstein’s role lauded by skipper David Burke, among others, and he highlights communication – something which wasn’t emphasised during his extensive sports science studies – as the reason why he has endeared himself to those he works with.
“If you don’t have a good relationship with the manager, the players and the coaches, forget about it,” he says. “You’re going nowhere so you need to find that middle ground. Communication is massive and you need to understand that you are coaching human beings.
“You need to have that empathy and my primary goal is to keep the players happy. I know if they are happy that they are going to give a lot to their manager. I try to keep everything as individual with players as possible but I always try to work around making players happy.
“You are a small part of the machinery. Sometimes it is blown out of proportion a little bit because people see teams doing well and say, ‘Jesus, they are so fit’, but I can tell you in hurling if your skill is poor and you don’t really understand the game-plan well or your touch is poor, you’ve straight away wasted so much energy. You’ll be doing headless chicken running and things like that.”
Kirszenstein, who hails from the small town of Nowe (one hour south of Gdańsk), had a brief spell working with Limerick’s U-21s in 2012 and while the Treaty’s physical conditioning is hailed as one of the determining factors in their All-Ireland SHC final defeat of his Galway side two years ago and the dominance that followed, he sees it a little differently.
“Limerick are fit for sure but it’s not the fitness that makes them look so good, they’re well managed and organised so well in terms of the game-plan and their touch was exceptionally good, even in January and February they were so sharp that it makes them look like superhumans almost,” he says. “We talk among coaches and they’re not superhumans. We have some fantastic athletes, trust me, in Galway and when I was in Tipp, there are some phenomenal athletes there. But at the end of the day it’s how you put everything together and my bit is only small.
“I play a big part in probably synchronising everything but the fitness bit is not as big as people think. What we do is sometimes blown out of proportion because even the fittest people, they run into trouble or difficulty sooner or later when their skills let them down. Hurling is chaos so you need to practise chaos as much as you can.” *****
T’S peculiar that the 39-year-old can communicate so efficiently within a game which is so innately Irish but he “loved it from the first second” he saw hurls swinging having come from a martial arts background and competed at kickboxing for 12 years. “Lessons were learned”
Ifrom his initial hurling experience in 2008 with Limerick club Blackrock and his fascination with the small ball has resulted in his soccer interest flatlining as “even a bad hurling match has so much more going on than a good soccer match”.
Being a GAA outsider meant he had no ties so when O’Shea came calling with Tipp at the end of 2012, there was no fear of him being overawed by the task at hand and the big personalities coming under his wing.
“I didn’t really have extensive knowledge of counties and big names and I came with no burden. Lar Corbett? Who the f**k is Lar Corbett like?” he jokes.
“I had that kind of approach, it was a blank page for me and it was easier to work then.
“S&C coaches do the same thing, it’s just the dose and timings that matter. It’s like cooking, if you give me ingredients and the recipe and you have Gordon Ramsay beside me with the same ingredients and the same recipe and we both cook the dish following the procedure, we’re going to end up with completely different dishes. “S&C is the same, we have the same ingredients and we know what to do and what not to do, it’s just that little dash of salt, a dash of pepper here that sometimes makes a difference. Sometimes. Because I always believe that fitness will not win you a game but lack of it can definitely lose you a game.
“Players sometimes think that, ‘If I get super fit, I’ll do well’. In most cases, that’s not actually true because at some stage the diminishing returns rule comes into play.
“If you get to a high level, the amount of time invested at developing certain fitness qualities, strength or running fitness for example, doesn’t really guarantee big returns.
Unique
“So I said maybe it’s time to invest your money in additional skills, be it developing an athletic skill like speed or a sporting skill, in tactics and reading the opposition and stuff like that. That’s where you can make bigger improvements. Sure, you can get super fit but if you end up chasing the ball for 70 minutes, what is the point?”
He views inter-county players as “really unique individuals” given that they often train as much as professionals but “they sometimes forget that recovery and rest is part of training and they think it’s not training because they are not working hard”.
Employment is the key difference between amateur GAA players and professional athletes so the balancing act between work and training is something which Kirszenstein has sought to remedy.
Actimet is a user-friendly app which he developed in partnership with Rory McGauran – who also heads the performance analysis team for Galway’s hurlers – and South Afri
can tech genius Edward Kaschula to provide management with information about players that informs key decisions.
The likes of Galway’s senior hurlers and footballers, club football kings Corofin, Tottenham Hotspur women’s soccer, a host of Polish Premier League sides (Lukasz translated the app to Polish) as well as some recently-signed US and Canadian NHL sides are among the 120 teams already on their books.
With a subscription fee of €50 a month – “less than the cost of one physio session” – and athletes logging their data privately “in less than 30 seconds”, he may have struck upon a magic formula that could massively change communication within teams.
Recording their activities and the exertion involved, rating their wellness in terms of sleep, energy and mood, a Covid-19 assessment as well as giving feedback on various aspects of training and load management in a hassle-free manner has helped to open his eyes on best practice.
“It benefits coaches, teams and most importantly their athletes. The idea comes from me initially trying to collect data, trying to get insight into athletes’ training and spending hours typing it into Excel.
“When you’re spending time typing in the data then you have very little time to analyse it and actually use it,” he says of Actimet’s development.
“You can get insight into what your players are doing and how they are reacting to what they are doing, on and off the pitch. There’s no sports science needed to analyse the information or read the comments or to see how many times your players were training weekly or what is their mood or stress levels. Everyone can do that.
“Some clubs even invest as far as buying expensive GPS units yet they’re not doing anything basic like, ‘How well did you sleep? What is your energy level today? What’s your stress level? Any comments in relation to what goes on at home, your missus is at you maybe, work is pressurising you’.
“Instead they’re getting tons of different GPS metrics and trying to find out, ‘How many metres are you covering? How many metres were you sprinting? What is your high metabolic distance etc?’ Actimet is so within grasp for clubs and counties and it has a big return for managers if they invest time into it.”
Serving
‘Watch lists’ for players serving several managers, a traffic light system to identify possible risks and wellness data aim to greatly reduce injuries and he has no problem admitting that red flags from player feedback have helped to save his bacon on a few occasions.
“I can actually see red flags as a coach and it’s a big conversation starter that has saved my ass many, many times.
“Players are logging in something in terms of soreness and they maybe don’t report it to the physio,” he outlines.
“I ask did a player report the stuff he logged in his wellness survey to the physio and if they didn’t, I can pull the player back and he goes to the physio and misses probably one session. If he trained he would probably blow up and be injured for three weeks so it saves time and money.
“GAA is a funny one too, some players will not tell you if they don’t like something, they won’t go near the manager. There’s that kind of a hierarchy in GAA still where the manager is almost still like a god and, ‘Oh my God, I better not say that I don’t like stuff ’.
“But they are willing to type comments and it’s really great stuff sometimes, especially in pre-season where you do certain sessions where they can say they loved the session or they thought it was a waste of time and it’s also a great pointer in terms of wellness.
“We have to realise that if someone is having a hard time at home, school or at work, it affects them in every way: speed, power, fitness, whatever it is because head affects everything down the line and people don’t really understand it that way.
“You often hear in the media or from the supporters, ‘They want it more’ What does that mean? ‘They’re hungrier’ What does that mean like?
“All intercounty athletes are hungry and they all want to win, some of them might not have all the essential tools in the toolbox to win, but they all step onto the pitches around the country or Croke Park on the big days to win, none of them consider losing but different stressors, or the way we build up training to big games affect people in different ways.
“There’s no such thing as hunger. They can be flat but that’s probably because I f**ked up and maybe I didn’t advise my management precisely enough in terms of duration of training and the session content building up to those key games, it sometimes happens when you have 36 lads to manage.”
W***** ERE it not for the 2018 All-Ireland SHC final defeat, Kirszenstein would have etched his name in history with a hat-trick of Liam MacCarthy triumphs in succession but there are few regrets about that loss.
He is not one for excuses and identifies the epic All-Ireland semi-final draw against Clare as part of their undoing with injuries to key men like Gearóid McInerney and Joe Canning, as well as an unusually long season, resulting in their worst performance being saved until last.
“Our job was to beat Clare in the first exposure and we didn’t do that. That second game probably cost us a little bit because when we left Thurles after beating Clare in the replay, Limerick were coming back from Fota Island after a bonding camp,” he recalls.
“So we were just happy we got over the line and in two weeks’ time we play Limerick and they were just
waiting for us there, fresh and ready to go. It doesn’t really take anything away from Limerick, they were just better on the day. Would the game have been a little bit different if we were a bit sharper?
“I don’t like to say that because I thought they were worthy winners. Do I have regrets? No, because I thought I did everything I could to keep the lads on the pitch and manage their fitness and fatigue throughout the course of nine championship games.
“Limerick were coming, whether in ’18 or later, and they are the team to beat now.”
Galway was in a state of chaos last autumn following Donoghue’s shock resignation – months after their tumultuous early exit from the Leinster race – and controversy at county board level but the retention of Kirszenstein’s services was a welcome boost.
Having him steering the ship in his role as head of athletic development with Galway’s flagship hurling team as well as the minor and U-20 sides was just the tonic needed to keep the train on the tracks before Shane O’Neill was eventually unveiled as the new boss in November.
Working remotely in his role during the coronavirus pandemic is a challenge but utilising the background of Croke Park for his Zoom meetings with Galway players helps them “to keep the goal in mind and know that it’s still there” with inter-county action set to resume in October after a seven-month hiatus.
Kirszenstein manages the progress of over 100 athletes in different codes from home as part of his online coaching platform GPC Performance, all the while trying to keep his three-year-old boy David – “a volcano of energy” – on a tight rein.
Those within Kirszenstein’s care have only good things to say with Tipperary defender Pádraic Maher lauding his personalised programmes and how they focused on individual mobility rather than increased bulk and this is something he feels strongly about.
“How fit is fit enough or how fit is too fit? You hear stories now about some clubs and counties doing a crazy amount of running, it’ll probably give them an advantage in terms of aerobic fitness alright but it’s only one component of the whole physical development jigsaw,” Lukasz says. “There is a thing from managers that you try to go and bulk up lads fast and I’d always be against doing that in an accelerated manner because if players gain weight too fast, it’s almost like the analogy I give of driving skills.
“If you have a Nissan Micra and you are driving it and I take your Micra away and I put you in a lorry, it’s still driving, isn’t it?
“But it’s a different driving experience altogether. A lad was 70 kilos but a manager wants him to add 10 kilos in three or four months. It is doable but you’re most likely going to break his game. He’ll probably need to spend an additional year or two relearning how to use his body again, it’s like learning to drive a lorry having driven a Micra. Lean muscle gain in team sports is a marathon, not a sprint.”
Coming into a GAA environment without any baggage also gives him a unique perspective on some norms in the Association and the notion of alcohol being demonised by those in power and drink bans being put in place to deter social activity is something he strongly rails against.
“It’s a part of the culture and it’s actually creating a massive issue because if you restrict something for a long time, what’s going to happen when the whole thing is lifted? You fall into binge situations and the lads go bananas,” he says.
“Would I blame them? No. County set-ups are stressful enough, especially during the championship and when you get to the big games, physical stress is one thing but the mental stress of the game and the other things around are another thing.
Funny
“They’ve huge weight on their shoulders and you’re going without the ability to switch off and blow off a bit of steam, that just creates a funny environment and that, for me, is wrong. The problem is that it’s gone so far how do you manage to return to some normality?
“It’s not normal, restricting grownups. I don’t really get that. From a sports science point of view, alcohol and performance don’t really mix well but if someone is kept into a certain type of a bubble that they can’t really blow off a bit of steam, then it is not really good either. When they eventually can then they just go mad.”
He may not have been born into the GAA or grown up on a hurling diet but the game is in a better place for Kirszenstein’s presence and Galway will be doing everything in their power to make sure that he is in their corner for many years to come.