GAELIC FOOTBALL
The flexible approach to training
Dublin’s players avoid injury by following individually tailored programmes that focus more on pilates and yoga than weights
Declan Bogue
September 8 2018, 12:01am, The Times
In the 25th minute of last weekend’s All-Ireland football final, Tyrone’s Connor McAliskey took off down the Cusack Stand side in pursuit of the ball against Dublin’s Cian O’Sullivan.
As soon as McAliskey turned, O’Sullivan gave up the chase with a nip on his hamstring ending his day.
This was a legacy issue for O’Sullivan, who has suffered from bad hamstrings since he was in his teens. In 2011, manager Pat Gilroy gave him all of the Leinster campaign off to get himself sorted. When he came in for the All-Ireland quarter-final against Tyrone, he passed out Stephen O’Neill on his way to interceptions.
We detail all of this as context, because the fact remains that under Jim Gavin, no Dublin player has missed an All-Ireland final through a soft-tissue injury. While the debate continues about all the financial largesse Dublin GAA enjoys, little attention is given to their extraordinary record in keeping injury-free, save for the usual cases of cruciate ligament ruptures.
During the tenure of Gilroy, Gavin’s predecessor, they used Sami Dowling, currently head of fitness at Bray Wanderers, as their guide in strength and conditioning.
To make sure players were using the correct squatting technique, he demonstrated with a broom handle. Throughout that season there was a marked change in the physiques of the likes of Alan and Bernard Brogan and Barry Cahill.
While Dublin won their All-Ireland, the injury record had to be addressed by Gavin and he has evolved the Dublin collective training significantly since.
During the league, they have two collective sessions a week in the Innisfails club. The emphasis is on what they term “athletic development”, tailored to the individual and is designed by the 2011 All-Ireland winning captain, Bryan Cullen, who had experience of what 2010 gave his side, but also of the injuries that curtailed the end of his playing career.
Aside from what they do on the pitch, there is an emphasis on doing pilates classes. Yoga is also prevalent and some have taken it to the next level, Michael Darragh Macauley going on to become a qualified Yogi.
Clare Loughran, a physio who has worked with Antrim hurlers over 15 years ago and was part of the medical staff when Tyrone minor footballers won their All-Ireland in 2008, is also a pilates instructor and has studied intently the changes in attitudes towards strength and conditioning.
“For a while it was lifting heavy loads,” she said. “What they found was that heavy loads meant bulk but not necessarily speed. The modern game is one of moving the ball on and not the traditional full-back mentality of ‘he just needs to be a horse of a man that can shift a heavy tackle’.
“With that came the need for speed and agility which comes with being able to put a limb through its full range of movement.
“Think of a sprinter lifting his knee almost to his chest as he pushes down the track then striding his leg out behind him to cover as much ground as he can in as few strides as needed, therefore making him move more efficiently.
“Pilates and yoga come into play then to try to achieve that extra range as such to the joint, by improving flexibility. But also there is the injury prevention aspect where pilates very much focuses on the stability muscles such as your lower abdominals and glutes so if they are working the way they should, then they are stabilising the central strut — your trunk — and the limbs can move more effectively off a stable base.”
Prior to the All-Ireland final, Tyrone captain Matthew Donnelly articulated the evolution of physical preparation from a player’s viewpoint.
When he was still a teenager, his father sought the help of Paddy Tally, now the Down manager, who handed him a range of exercises to build his frame.
“A lot of weights in it. Like, curls back then, which you wouldn’t hear tell of now,” he said.
From bulking up, the target has evolved for players.
“Number one, most important thing in football is availability, is being fit to play. You don’t want to jeopardise that by doing something silly in the gym,” Donnelly said.
“That’s always been the goal for me, is to, number one, be able to play and be robust enough to stand the requirements for intercounty football. If you’re fit and available for selection, that’s always the most important thing.”
When Tyrone won their first All-Ireland against Armagh, the panel barely lifted weights, instead concentrating on sharp, short training sessions that never went beyond an hour. During the league, they only met up once a week.
As gym programmes became widespread through intercounty teams later in that decade, it seemed that was one variable that lower-ranking teams could make gains in and close gaps to the elite sides. Yet most have abandoned that thinking. Take Carlow for example and their best season in several decades where they gained promotion to Division Three and reached the Leinster semi-final.
Throughout the year, they named almost an identical team in league and championship with the exception of Barry-John Molloy who suffered a leg break and Brendan Murphy who opted to spend his summer in America.
Their management team examined their injury list from the year before and changed tack throughout the league.
Anyone who played a full game over the weekend would only do a bit of pulse-raising work on Tuesday — a light jog or a spell on the spin bike and a lot of static stretching to encourage blood flow. The rest would do some conditioning work through small-sided games.
Come Thursday, the whole panel would train collectively. Pilates was not only encouraged among the wider panel but insisted upon for some players as part of their weekly routine.
When it came to the gym side of strength and conditioning, their coach Steven Poacher says: “There was an emphasis on movement over muscle.
“To the layman what that means is there are people who will go into the gym and do some bicep curls and lift these bulky weights and that’s all about muscle, chest press and so on. Whereas the more tailored strength-and-conditioning programme now is all based around game-specific movements with resistance.
“You might be doing something like a fella could have a resistance band around your waist, you will be thrown a football and you have to drive towards that football for a few yards and handpass it back to someone.
“It’s game-specific movements. Step-ups, explosive step-ups, use of medicine balls for rotational throws.
“Plyometrics, power jumps — box jumps to really charge up the glutes and the hamstrings. You are doing a lot of rotational stuff so you would be in a press-up position and then rotate the body up to a ‘T’ position, be in a press-up position and bring your right knee up to your left shoulder, a lot of those type of movements.”
Carlow have leaned heavily on Melissa Broderick, a PE teacher who is also a qualified pilates instructor and the sister of their free-taker, Paul.
“She made the point that in the gym, everything is done in a linear line; you squat in a straight line, you lunge in a straight line, you shoulder press in a straight line, but when you come to play Gaelic football everything is rotational,” Poacher says.
“Your hips rotate, your shoulders rotate. Everything is rotational and multi-functional. What she does is geared towards greater mobility around the hip, the hip flexors, really opening up that hip joint. Firing up the glutes — she is massive into this so she puts bands on to the players and they do a lot of band work.”
Despite the advances made, old habits die hard. Some counties are still in thrall to the eyeballs-out approach, says Mick McGurn, former Ireland rugby and Armagh GAA strength and conditioning coach who now heads up the conditioning programmes at Queen’s University.
“If they were training to move better and be mobile, that’s grand. If they add on a massive external load on top of that it would be very hard to keep your mobility and recover,” he says.
“Some teams are doing it a lot smarter but a lot are just thinking, ‘Let’s do more of it.’ There is the thinking that if two is good, six must be better.”
He sees the flaws in teams when they go to face Dublin, saying: “A lot of teams build up their strength so they can use it but can’t get themselves into position to make it count, whereas the Dubs train for movement.
“They are doing a lot of basketball training and that’s all pass and move, pass and move. Not only are they getting that movement but they are also getting that hand-eye co-ordination as well. Bernard Dunne is doing a lot of hand-eye stuff through boxing as well.
“They have Jason Sherlock in there. The interesting by-product of that is it makes them better decision-makers under pressure, which basketball is all about, making the right decision.”
One final factor. When Tyrone faced Dublin, they did so with a range of players living and working in Dublin and Belfast. After training, they would face a long commute home, sitting in traffic and putting their hips out through clutching. While they were doing that, Dublin players were well into their recovery. Good recovery is worth as much as a hard session. Perhaps in all the list of advantages Dublin enjoy, this could be among the most important.
GAA adopts new-age methods
Doing strength and conditioning to treat injuries is nothing new. In fact, Pat Spillane detailed his efforts to come back for the five-in-a-row bid with Kerry in 1982 that ultimately ended in failure, by creating a makeshift gym in his own garage and strengthening his damaged knee through a series of dips and lunges.
Since then, cutting-edge science has gradually worked its way into the GAA and while a core level of lifting will provide a base of strength for players, more and more are seeking “new-age” methods to maintain flexibility, such as yoga and pilates.
