All Blacks trainer now has a squad of 30 McCaws
Nic Gill reveals that Dick Tonks was a major influence and says the current squad can all handle a workload like Richie.
Enthusiasm radiates from Nic Gill, the strength and conditioning coach for the All Blacks.
Working with him recently on a chapter for a book on men’s health it’s easy to see why he can persuade All Blacks to train so hard that Kieran Read sent a text to Gill during the week saying he was looking forward to the 11 hour 40 minute flight to Buenos Aires because it meant Read ‘‘could sleep’’.
A coach with a similar compelling nature was the late Arthur Lydiard, who took Peter Snell and Murray Halberg to Olympic gold medals. It’s a comparison that makes Gill deeply uncomfortable, given that he’s part of a large management group with the All Blacks, not an individual coach, but having known Lydiard too, I swear it’s apt.
Gill makes anything seem possible, even logical. There’s an almost evangelical enthusiasm, whether he’s talking about an office worker parking his car a few blocks away from his workplace to get in a morning walk, or taking the All Blacks to new levels of fitness.
Another thing Gill has in common with Lydiard is not offering any alternative to hard work. Lydiard’s guidelines included running 160km a week, a regime that reduced Snell to tears the first time he finished the 35km run through the rugged Waiatarua ranges that was a regular Sunday treat for Lydiard’s athletes.
When Gill took over the conditioning of the All Blacks eight years ago he had a perfect subject in captain Richie McCaw.
‘‘Richie was interesting because he just had a big diesel engine. He could just go all day at a reasonable pace. He wasn’t fast, but he never slowed down. When and if he chooses to, he could be a very good long distance runner. He just has this big aerobic engine.
‘‘Most people will slow down under effort. He was almost unique in that he didn’t. Why he stood out for all those years was because he could handle a whole lot of work. He loved to get out on the Port Hills or on his bike and smash himself up the hills. He loved that hard work. ‘‘
Now here’s something that should make other international teams shiver just a little.
The All Black workload is getting tougher every year. And they’re thriving on it the way McCaw did.
Five years ago, says Gill, if he prescribed the work the current side does McCaw could have handled it, but there might have been a group of five or six who would have been injured. Now there are none.
Why? ‘‘Because of the academy systems, the Super Rugby systems, and the professionalism of the players,’’ says Gill, ‘‘they’re able to tolerate a lot more.’’
Watch an All Black like Jerome Kaino closely now, and one of the most outstanding, if largely unremarked, features of his play, is how he bounces back so quickly from contact.
The way he and his team-mates remain involved so much, thanks to their fitness levels, is the reason the All Blacks often seem to have extra men on the field. Overlaps become the norm when players are involved more than once in a movement.
Two men in particular have been influential in shaping Gill’s methods.
One is rowing coach Dick Tonks. Just before he joined the All Black camp in 2008 Gill ran the off the water strength work for New Zealand rowing, so he saw Tonks’ methods at close range.
Even though Eric Murray and Hamish Bond excoriated Tonks in their recent book for a lack of man management, Murray told me just after they severed relations with Tonks in 2012 that, ‘‘I’d give him 11 out of 10 for his fitness training.’’ As with Lydiard, the Tonks’ mantra was to work hard, and then work much, much harder.
Gill says that, like Tonks, the All Blacks, ‘‘don’t try to overcomplicate things, we just try to be bloody good at them. His philosophy was that if you can’t handle the workload you’re not going to be an Olympic champion.’’
Another coach he admires is a Canadian ironman expert, Kristian Manietta. ‘‘He’s very much of the opinion it’s not about always changing what we do, but repetition,’’ says Gill. ‘‘Getting really good at the basics allows us to work super hard, because we’re familiar with what we’re doing.’’
In fitness and skill training, as distinct from tactical coaching, the All Blacks have occasionally been world leaders.
In the 1960s, the great Fred Allen raised the fitness bar with sessions that included ‘‘arse knockers’’, where the players would run the length of the field, starting at a jog, then gradually speeding up until they sprinted the last quarter. ‘‘He did them,’’ said the late All Black Snow White, ‘‘until you were ready to fall over.’’
In the 1980s, Alex Wyllie brought a Scottish-born former football player, Jim Blair, into the rugby fold and Blair introduced grids,
Nic Gill
where players criss-crossed at high speed passing a ball, to the Canterbury, then Auckland, then All Black teams. The details have changed, but handling under pressure remains part of All Black training today.
The success of the mix of All Black training in 2016 supports recent criticism from inside English rugby that an over emphasis there on weight training has made England’s players bigger and stronger, but not automatically better.
Specifically, the week leading into a test for the All Blacks now will be a mixture of five hours on rugby field, largely at aerobic level (when the body isn’t pushed so hard players are gasping for air), 30
We don’t try to overcomplicate things, we just try to be bloody good at them.
or 40 minutes of anaerobic training (working at such speed the body goes into oxygen debt), 90 minutes to two hours of flexibility and mobility work, and four hours of strength training.
After each team session every player spends 20 minutes on individual skills. In other words, about 70 per cent of the training doesn’t include weights.
Gill is absolutely right when he points out he’s only one man in a large, smoothly functioning, machine.
But all great teams are the result of a myriad outstanding individual parts. There can be no doubt that one area giving the current side an edge are the systems Gill has developed since 2008.