With the WRU Centre of Excellence bursting at the seams with the three Six Nations squads and the Wales Sevens team all vying to use the facilities, Pledger has taken his show on the road and utilised high spec facilities around south Wales.
Recently, elite referees Nigel Owens and Craig Evans trained at University of Wales Trinity Saint David’s High Performance Lab in Carmarthen before the duo joined a selection of academy referees at Cardiff Metropolitan University’s National Indoor Athletics Centre earlier this week.
“By exposing academy referees to the elite training programme, hopefully we will be able to accelerate their development,” explained Pledger.
“The session proved invaluable for the boys as they had to view video clips on ipads, from competitions like the Super 15, Six Nations and the World Sevens series while being under fatigue, as they were viewing the videos during brief rest periods during an intense interval training session.”
Pledger hasn’t just been focusing on the up and coming referees in the system, he’s also been putting elite duo Nigel Owens and Craig Evans through their paces.
Earlier this month they came under the eagle eye of physiologist Dr Peter Herbert in Carmarthen where they had different aspects of their fitness measured, undertaking VO2max testing; lower body power analysis and body composition checks.
“It was great to be able to use the university facilities and to work with Dr Peter Herbert,” said Pledger.
“Obviously the lab at UWTSD is top quality so we thought it would a very good opportunity to get some gold standard testing done.
“We achieved a good batch of testing there – aerobic capacity testing, body compositions, lower body power and reactions as well, so it’s about looking at those results, seeing if the referees are off the pace in any one of those areas and putting appropriate strategies in place if any areas are deficient.”
Having developed good working relationships with universities over south Wales over the past few weeks, Pledger is keen to continue the off-piste sessions as it is well worth the exercise.
