Fitness guru faces his greatest challenge yet
Huw Bevan, now at the US Eagles, has trained leading names for years, writes Daniel Schofield
For all the science behind strength and conditioning, it remains the finest of arts. The skill is not just in knowing exactly where each player’s breaking point lies but in persuading them repeatedly to venture to the darkest of physical places.
It is a craft that Huw Bevan has been honing for more than 20 years, which has included spells at Cardiff, Bridgend, Ospreys and Dragons, as well as a five-year period as the England cricket team’s fitness coach which coincided with their rise to the top of the Test rankings.
His latest project might be his most challenging yet, as head of strength and conditioning for the United States Eagles, who have been drawn in the World Cup’s “group of death” with England, France, Argentina and Tonga.
Back in the early Nineties, it would have been debatable who might have dreaded the introduction of tight-fitting shirts the most out of England’s cricketers and rugby team. Yet, whereas strength and conditioning kicked in after rugby union turned professional, the attitude within cricket towards fitness training remained ambivalent at best.
When Bevan, who played as a hooker for Bridgend, was appointed by England head coach Andy Flower in 2009, one of his first jobs was to change that mindset.
“In terms of cricket, the relationship between conditioning and performance has not always necessarily been as obvious as it is in rugby,” Bevan said. “Fielding is an area where, if you improve someone’s athleticism, speed and power, then there is a direct correlation with improved performance. Once we had established that conditioning was an important part of performance in cricket, then we started working on a lot of other areas.”
The fittest player he has worked with was not a rugby player, but former England opener Alastair Cook. “His yo-yo [endurance test] scores were off the scale,” Bevan says.
However, not every cricketer relished that side of things. “We were fortunate that Andy Flower, along with Andrew Strauss and Cook, were instrumental in ensuring the players understood that attention to your conditioning was non-negotiable,” Bevan said. “There were a few players along the way who did not attend to that aspect as well as they should have who were not selected when they might have been on purely cricketing performance.”
Yet, whereas the goal with England was to make them the fittest team in the world, the aim
with the Eagles is simply to close the considerable gap between them and the tier-one nations. This is why Gary Gold, the US head coach, describes Bevan’s appointment last year as “possibly the most influential thing we have done in the past 12 months; to get a guy of his calibre and who was keen enough to join us was a game-changer”.
Having worked with several Wales internationals at the Ospreys and Dragons, Bevan knew the benchmarks he needed to work toward. A starker illustration came in their fixture against Ireland last year.
A close-fought 24-14 half-time deficit gave way to a 57-14 blowout, but the damage had been done in the first 40 minutes.
“The first half was one of the most demanding games we have been involved with in terms of the number of periods of play that extended for 90 seconds,” Bevan said. “We had four periods of play between 60-90 seconds, three periods between two minutes and three minutes and one period of play that was greater than three minutes.”
After that chastening experience, Bevan formulated a series of worst-case statistics for ball-in-play time, number of phases and high-speed metres covered that the US could face in Japan. He then drew up a conditioning plan that would ensure the Eagles will be physically competitive no matter the opposition.
There are no great secrets to Bevan’s methods. Within rugbybased sessions, there are three variables: the length of the training periods, the intensity of those periods and the length of the rest periods. If you miss the sweet spot, then you can either find yourself with a glut of injuries or entering a tournament undercooked.
But the second part of a fitness coach’s role is effectively that of a psychologist. “If a player is doing something unbelievably unpleasant but he understands what the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow looks like, then you have the buy-in,” Gold said. “And that’s where Huw is unbelievable.”
The problem is that while Bevan has been working on reaching the standards that were set in that Ireland match, so all the tier-one teams have been beasted in their own camps. So, how do the US and the other tier-two nations catch up when the bar they are chasing is continually being raised?
“We need to make sure we are improving faster than anybody else,” Bevan said. “Some of our guys are in full-time professional environments but a lot of them are also in semi-professional environments, so the window for our improvement is greater than a lot of other teams. That’s the opportunity we have to maximise.”
Quite how much they have closed the gap will be revealed when the Eagles face England in their World Cup opening game on Sept 26.
The aim with the Eagles is to close the gap between them and the tier-one nations