THIS has been a strange situation for every single club player up and down the country.

How much training is too much? How much is too little? 5km runs are well played out and the question remains, are they even relevant?

At least now with the news from Stormont of a return in four weeks’ time to training in pods of 15, this is a fantastic opportunity for the club players to engage in four weeks of good, solid conditioning training on their own in preparation for their late pre-season of 2021.

For me personally, I am a firm believer that players should strive to arrive at the commencement of any pre-season training year fit to play football.

In an ideal world it would be great if players came back fit to train but, unfortunately, this is not the case for a majority of clubs and players.

A way around this problem is by organising collective sessions earlier in the year or by possibly providing players with some individual conditioning sessions to do but obviously the former wasn’t visible this year due to Covid-19 regulations.

Whatever you decide to do, one thing should not change and that’s the training method the players should use.

For a number of years now, I have been preaching to colleagues of mine about the benefits of HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) sessions in comparison to long, slow continuous training and the relevance it has in comparison to the 5km brigade.

Chatting to a couple of runners who said to me, a 5km road runner wouldn’t be doing the volume of running some of our Gaelic footballers have been doing.

Simplistically, HIIT is so much handier, quicker, and more effective in less time, but scientifically its benefits are enormous. One particular scientific benefit is the enhancement of the EPOC effect, full title “Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption (EPOC). In basic language, the afterburn!

Imagine a car at the end of a long journey, the engine has worked extremely hard and even when you stop for a considerable period of time the engine remains quite warm and only gradually cools to normal temperature.

The exact same thing happens to your body, once exercise is over you can continue to burn more calories, a physiological effect known as EPOC.

The best way for a Gaelic footballer to stimulate the EPOC effect is simply through High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT).

You could easily complete a 35-minute (including warm-up) HIIT session on your own. It’s a fantastic workout .You are are not plodding monotonously around a field for 30 or 40 minutes, instead the session is performed at a high intensity with specific rest periods.

Every week you can vary the venue, distances you cover, time, terrain, all just to keep it fresh and interesting but the intensity should remain the same as the intensity is the key to influencing EPOC.

Try a HIIT session; here are some of the many benefits of such a session:

Quick, efficient and not time consuming.

Helps burn more calories/fat even hours after completing the session!

Game specific conditioning, replicates work/recovery times.

Leaves you stronger, more powerful, improves heart and lung efficiency and endurance.

Trains the body to remove waste products in the muscles quickening recovery!

EPOC can also be achieved through small-sided games, but for the first few weeks in training, there needs to be a cautious approach to the volume of twisting and turning players will be exposed to.

Lengthening the size of your game-grids to incorporate more speed and endurance work earlier rather than smaller-sized games will help prevent injuries.