“I rarely feature for the full game, and even when I am on I struggle to get around. How can I improve my fitness?”
Andy Williams, via Twitter
George Boyd
says:
“I’m lucky – it comes naturally to me. Even at school I was good at cross country. At Peterborough, when we didn’t have the Prozone stats, I was probably covering a lot of ground, but it wasn’t as magnified as it is nowadays.
I might be naturally fit, but I work on it. At Burnley we do between eight and 13 box-to-box runs. It’s nothing different to any other club; as a pro footballer you do a lot of high-intensity training – 12 minutes is probably the longest you’ll run for.
At the start of my career we used to run for miles, but that’s changed now – it’s just shorter and sharper stuff. Sports science has brought about this change.
We train for 90 minutes and everything is done at maximum effort. You train how you play to perform at a high level.
If you’re an amateur training on a Tuesday and Thursday and then playing on a Saturday, you need to rest so that you can recuperate.
We’ll have ice baths if we’ve got a midweek game, and on Mondays we have an intense warm-down to get everything out of the system.”
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