Pre-season training horror now outdated

LONDON. — Pre-season training used to be brutal. It was often designed to be as unpleasant as possible. Football players were pushed to their limits and beyond, both mentally and physically.

That approach is now considered outdated and counter-productive. Where once pre-season was a means to impose discipline and work off summer excesses, players are now expected to return in good condition, ready to pick up where they left off. That was not always the case.

“A dramatic change came around with sports science people getting involved,” says former Aston Villa and Birmingham City defender Liam Ridgewell. “The first week nowadays is very light. They don’t want too many injuries.

“You’re eased back in, so you haven’t got the lung-busting runs we used to have. It’s normally single sessions in the morning. Back in the day, you were doing doubles for the first month.”

Twenty years ago, when Ridgewell was part of the highly regarded Villa youth set-up, an old-fashioned attitude prevailed. Endless running was the order of the day, even if some players were not prepared to take it seriously.

“You’d leave the training ground at Bodymoor Heath and run to Drayton Manor, round and then back,” he recalls. “You had some of the boys hiding in bushes and jumping out at you on the second lap because they didn’t really want to do it.”

Lots of managers set out to make their players suffer in pre-season, believing they would be stronger for it. Starting his career with Luton Town as a teenager, future England international Matt Upson was daunted by the prospect.

“Sometimes we’d go to places to run and train until you were looking at your breakfast on the floor,” he says.

“That was the mentality of a pre-season. That used to be met with a bit of nervous tension, especially when you’d go somewhere obscure - a ridiculous set of hills - and you’d get out of the minibus. You’d have those butterflies in the stomach, knowing what was to come.”

Although pre-season has changed a lot over recent years, incorporating sleep monitoring, GPS trackers and individualised training plans, that edge has not entirely disappeared. Mental strength and endurance are still required to make it through.

Towards the end of his career, as the Stoke City squad flew out to Austria, Upson did not know quite what to expect. It was his first and only pre-season under notorious taskmaster Tony Pulis, who gladly lived up to his reputation.

“A lot of the players had worked with him before,” says Upson. “They were like: ‘Just wait and see where we’re going.”

“We went to this mountain and rode bikes up it one morning, at 6am. Then we trained in the gym in the middle of the day and did a football session late afternoon. The next day we cycled there and ran up and down the mountain. It wasn’t a gradual gradient. He’d be there with the staff, timing everyone in groups.

“You’d get back to the hotel and there was a real level of satisfaction and achievement, having finished it. It builds your mentality and belief in your ability to push beyond what you thought the boundaries were.”

Marc Pugh encountered something similarly taxing, albeit rather closer to home, when he was coming through the ranks at Burnley. Terry Pashley, the club’s youth team manager, enjoyed testing his players on difficult terrain.

“First day, we’d run through a forest as fast as we could, and it was so uneven. It was just ridiculous. We’d meet the manager at the bottom of the hill. I sometimes like a bit of old-school, but this was on another level,” says Pugh.

“When everyone had got there, we’d do interval sprints up the hill. The quicker you got to the manager, the more rest you got before you did the hill, so you had that incentive. That was before the actual session started.

“You got absolutely slogged back in the day. You used to run until you dropped.”

The winger discovered a more sophisticated approach at Bournemouth, where he spent eight years working with Eddie Howe as they climbed the divisions. Fitness work was often disguised within complex, technical drills.

“We got brought into a presentation room and the gaffer tried explaining this drill. There were arrows everywhere. We were looking at it, thinking ‘oh my gosh’. It was full pitch. There was passing, crossing, finishing, tackling — everything involved. — BBC Sport.