Bennett happy to see Welsh players ‘flying’ in training

Twice daily sessions are being ramped up on the ‘live high, train low’ camp with the WRU’s head of physical conditioning, Huw Bennett, has stayed true to the only promise he made to the players, that they would work hard.

“Coming to Fiesch is definitely a highlight of our pre-season. It’s something we’ve planned for a long-time and we’ve had a good block of training so far,” said Bennett, who is in his third World Cup as a conditioning coach.

“The majority of the players have been in with us for just over seven weeks now. With the way the season finished we took a positive from a negative – we had more players from day one, so we’ve had a good time with a large core of the group.

“In fairness to the boys, even in the off season they put in the work we set out and they came in in good shape. We’ve had the fortune to be able to adjust as we go and introduce more rugby at an earlier stage than planned, which has been great.

“It’s our third time coming to Fiesch for an altitude camp. It’s a method of ‘live high, train low’, so we live at altitude at 2,400 metres up in FiescherAlp.
“Up there you get the natural adaptations of living at altitude, like increased haemoglobin mass and better transport of oxygen around the body. By training low, it means you don’t compromise on the intensity of your training.

The guys get the natural adaptations when they’re at the top and when they come down the bottom, we don’t have to hold back on anything in terms of our intensity and accuracy. There is no excuse for anything falling by.

“There are other benefits as well and we feel it works very well. The players come down on the gondola in 10 minutes and know what’s coming and what they’ve got to look forward to.

“They can see other groups working on the pitch as they’re coming down and the mindset is they’re here to work hard and get the job done. When they go back up, they switch off and enjoy each other’s company.

“The mini camps we had back home were about building resilience and laying the base of our fitness. In Switzerland, so we can push them harder and take things to another level.

“The boys have all bought into what we’re doing and they’ve got a really good attitude to what’s going on out here. Sometimes we give them an insight into what the session is going to be like, but sometimes we let the rumours run because it’s quite funny what comes back from them.”

Since the mini-camps began, the players were asked to rate the sessions in terms of how tough they were from 1-10. The RPE – Rate of Perceived Exertion – has definitely gone up a notch in Switzerland, but there is still more to come.

“Every four years you see a big change in how you go about things. It is our third time coming here, but we are tweaking things – it is not a copy and paste exercise,” added Bennett.

“Going back to 2003, when I was first a player, there is a difference between the way things are done. Everyone is trying to get the best out of their teams. We’ve got our plan, and the buy-in we’ve had from players and coaches is how we get the best out of it.

“We’ve had a lot of 10s in the ratings of our session. If they are putting down 8s they simply aren’t working hard enough. There were definitely a couple of 10s yesterday (Saturday).

“We work on two, three-day blocks and we are a bit more conditioning focused in and around the rugby sessions. They are single days on the field.
“In the last week they will work in two, two-day blocks, morning and afternoon with weights in the morning. There will be a little bit more rugby during those double sessions.

“You have to plan everything properly so you don’t break people – you don’t want to take them to dark places just for the sake of it.
“We’ve got a number of core tests that we use to assess the players and they are surpassing the numbers they were setting at the end of Switzerland camp last time.

“In 2015, we had a week and a half before we came to Switzerland. The dynamic was different in 2019 because it was Switzerland, then games, and then the Turkey camp.

“Now we’ve had a longer period in Switzerland, then we go to Turkey and then we go into our games. Speaking to the players, they feel in a much better place, even in our first four days of Switzerland, than we did leaving here last time.”

It is three weeks to the Vodafone Summer Series, which will see Warren Gatland’s side play England home and away and then the reigning world champions, South Africa. The opening game at the World Cup is against Fiji in Bordeaux on 10 September.

The hard work will continue until then, with the size of the training squad set to be trimmed after the return from Switzerland and then Turkey.

“We’ve got to keep working hard through the period of the warm-up matches because while the games against England and South Africa are huge Test matches, they’re not the World Cup,” added Bennett.

“Don’t get me wrong, you want the players to go out and have good performances, they’re putting on the red jersey, but you don’t want to put them in a situation where they don’t feel prepared or fatigued.

“Of course, there’s that element to it, but the end goal is being on prime condition come that first game of Rugby World Cup.”

In the meantime, Bennett is a thinking of ways of keeping the players hard at it as the Fiesch camp moves into its second week.

He came up with a novel idea four years ago, paragliding into training with fellow coach Bobby Stridgeon

As the Welsh players looked up from their training field on Sunday, they would have seen no fewer than 25 paragliders soaring high above them in the skies. Will there be another one for them to keep their eyes on this week.

“Bobby and I did it from where we were staying four years ago,” explained Bennett, who played at three World Cups and won 51 caps. “It was nine days into the camp, and it felt like the players needed some kind of pick up.

“Back then the gondolas we took down to the training field from our hotel only came every 30 minutes, so there was a big emphasis on if you missed the gondola, you would have a forfeit.

“We staged it by running to the gondola and just missing it. The boys were warming up down below and we came paragliding onto the field while the music from ‘Mission Impossible’ was playing.

“I don’t want to replicate what we did then, but we might have something up our sleeve.”