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Strudwick: Recovery's key
Head of fitness and conditioning, Tony Strudwick, recently spoke to Inside United and gave an insight into his role of ensuring the players remain in peak condition for the business end of the season…
Are you happy with where the players are fitness-wise at this stage of the campaign?
Yes we are. We’ve come through the first half of the season now and are in a good position. We got off to a slow start which was perhaps a culmination of factors, including players coming back late from international duty and injuries, but from a fitness performance point of view I think we’re quite content. We’ve tried some different things this season and introduced some new ideas with regard to preparing the players for the robustness that you require for 50/60-game seasons. We’re happy with some and we’ll refine others. The new facilities at Carrington are also operational now and that will only help us from a fitness and medical perspective. To have travelled to places like Liverpool, Newcastle, Chelsea and City and won away from home has been great, but obviously we’re only halfway there. Last year we were in a good position but we saw how just a couple of results can cause a swing in momentum, so we’ve got to try and prepare for that come the end of the season. And we’ve got quite a few of the players back in the last couple of months or so, players like Kagawa, Nani, Anderson and Vidic are all pushing forward now. That only helps raise the quality throughout – it makes training more competitive and there is more competition for places.
How much variation does there tend to be between individuals when it comes to fitness? Players like Michael Carrick or Patrice Evra, for example, seem to be able to play 90 minutes almost every game…
Of course, football is a team sport but one of the key things is about how you manage individuals within that team structure. It’s not a case of having a one rule for all approach. We demand things from a team perspective, but there is very much an individual component to that. Some players like Patrice and Michael played four games in ten days over Christmas and Robin was also involved in all four. That tells you how important the recovery side of the game is as well and we’ve introduced some new recovery strategies that have so far gone down really well with the players. Some of the players will need extra recovery, while others will need additional work. That’s the challenge of our job really – to balance all the individuals. On any given day there are 25 to 30 first team players that we’re responsible for and they all have individual needs and requirements.
How far ahead do you plan with your department – might you see a free week a month or so ahead and earmark it for a period of rest, or a period of a certain form of training?
Yes, definitely. We tend to macromanagement the loads in terms of looking at the fixtures each month and then micromanage the loads within that. It’s difficult to do it from a seasonal perspective but you will have different periods throughout the season where we’ll reduce the training load when we’re going into a heavy fixture period, and when there are less games we can sometimes work the players harder. The week before we started the busy Christmas period against Swansea we had a free week and we felt that it would be good to work the players quite hard in order to carry them through that period and some of the players definitely benefitted from that. There is, of course, the other part of micromanaging whereby the manager picks the team and we have to react beyond that. So if some players are not selected for games we have to work them harder in training and maybe bring them in on days off for example. Bar the FA Cup replay and Southampton game we pretty much had a schedule of no midweek games last month so there were good opportunities to really get some work into the players and ‘fill the tanks up’ if you like which will hopefully help us push past the line at the end of the season with a trophy or two.
You touched on the recovery part of the game earlier, does it become just as important as the preparation side of things, particularly as we enter the latter stages of the season?
Absolutely, the recovery process is massively important. The expectations we have here and what this club demands is that we should be challenging for the Premier League and the Champions League in the latter part of the season and in order to do that we’ve got to prepare the players for that period where they’re potentially playing three games a week. So recovery becomes very important at the back end of the campaign. At any moment in time you’re looking at every player to be available and to be ready to come into the team and do a job. There is therefore a real emphasis on ensuring the players are recovered enough and in turn ready enough.
Pre-season seems like a long way away, but some of the tour dates have already been announced – presumably a lot of the plans are already in place for the trip?
Yes, we always have to be thinking ahead. It’s going to be a huge tour for us and we have to take into consideration lots of different things. Of course, there is the fitness side of things, but we also have to consider flight times and different timezones and look at the work we can do with regard to acclimatising and making sure the players are ready to work at the times they need to be ready to work on tour. The plans are already being put in place to ensure we have the best facilities and that logistically everything works as well as possible so the players can focus on the work they need to do. I’m sure it will be a great trip.