IT WOULDN’T BE THE first thing he’d be associated with, but there was a time when Pat Spillane was an early pioneer in strength and conditioning in the GAA.
It goes back to a nondescript club game in 1981 when he suffered an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) rupture.
Back then, there was no talk of ‘doing the cruciate’. But it was a career-ending injury.
Spillane was built different, with a stubborn devotion. After some research through his uncle Canon Michael Lyne, the Chaplain at Celtic, they found a surgeon in Cambridge that had repaired a cruciate injury, suffered by the soccer player George Burley.
Operation complete, Spillane conducted his own rehabilitation programme. He kitted his garage out with dumbbells and a leg curl machine to strengthen the quad muscles every second day, without exception. If a session fell on 23 December, then he was in his garage on Christmas Day.
He also did some mad stuff, such as fasten 10lb weights to his ankles and lap the Templenoe pitch 30 to 40 times a night.
It’s a stretch to say the modern strength and conditioning flowered from this, but it has become an essential component of Gaelic games. And yet, so little is actually understood and known of who does it, what it involves, and why.
The most significant moment of the evolution came with the return of some Gaelic footballers from spells at Aussie Rules Football.
When Anthony Tohill finished up with the Melbourne Demons, coming home to start a course in Queen’s University, he joined an engineering faculty that included the likes of Kieran McGeeney and Paul Brewster.
Their 1993 Sigerson Cup winning team was top-loaded with talent, including James McCartan, Feargal Logan, Cathal Murray and others. They made the gym their second home, with Tohill taking them through the session.
Nine years later, Armagh won the All Ireland title as the first side who made a virtue of 100% gym compliance. Their figurehead and leader was McGeeney; a magnificent specimen.
Nothing has been quite the same since.
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So who does this stuff?
There’s a great pub quiz question in here somewhere, but take the winners of the All Ireland titles in men’s Gaelic football and hurling in 2024. Add in the Tailteann Cup winners.
Those three teams, Armagh, Clare and Down, had their bodies tailored towards success by three people who have never kicked or pucked a ball in Gaelic games.
Julie Davis, Lukasz Kirszenstein and Jonny Davis. Two siblings steeped in Ulster Rugby and another Polish fella who has shaped three separate winners of the last eight All Ireland hurling titles.
That crossover is commonplace. Before 2013, when the IRFU clamped down on their coaching staff helping out other teams, usually county sides, there was an arms race to get the services of such expertise.
The Ulster Rugby system has fanned out across Gaelic football in particular. Davis was a former schoolboy rugby international who went on to play for his province.
Having qualified from the same sports studies class in Jordanstown as Jim McGuinness, he then joined the backroom of the Ravenhill organisation, spending almost 12 years there in total, nine as head of athletic development where he encountered 22 different coaching combinations. Declan Kidney brought him into the international set up.
At the height of Ulster’s “basket-case” period as described by Brian O’Driscoll, he was pushed out to the dismay of many of the players present.
Tyrone came in for him in late 2019. The impression he made on many players was instant and lasting. His misfortune was to arrive at a time when Covid restricted their championship to one rain-sodden defeat to Donegal in Ballybofey.
However, his name was out there now and when Peter Donnelly went back to Tyrone in late 2020, Davis took the role in Monaghan where he encountered Conor Laverty who had taken up a coaching role in Seamus McEnaney’s backroom.
Now, he’s in Laverty’s backroom at Down.
His sister Julie has long been in the Armagh set-up. Her own background was as a hurdler before injury ended her hopes at a young age.
She used her experiences as a springboard to drill down on the wider area of rehab. She was a sports masseuse for Ulster Rugby when a colleague, the Armagh coach John McCloskey, asked if she could do the same role with Armagh.
Until then, she had never been to a game. Her very first was the Armagh-Tyrone Ulster championship replay in 2002.
Some 22 years on, she was the lead Strength and Conditioning coach when they won their second.
Who else have we got? Well, there’s David Drake at Monaghan, who has previously worked with Worcester Warriors. There’s Matt Godfrey who was helping Derry this season and previously Ulster Rugby.
And then the architect of the fearsomely imposing physiques of the Limerick hurling squad, Cairbre Ó Cairealláin, a Belfast man with a brother in the rap combo Kneecap, and who worked with Tipperary for their 2016 Liam MacCarthy triumph before taking his talents Shannonside.
On and on it goes, some of the most in-demand figures in the GAA. And yet little of what they actually do is common knowledge.
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What is it they do?
Let’s put it in as simple terms as possible. You can train a player to greater levels of Aerobic fitness, through a running programme.
To strengthen the player, it becomes Anaerobic fitness. Without gym equipment, you are limited to body weight exercises: sit-ups, push-ups, pull-ups if you have a bar handy.
That player however will always be limited to their own innate capacity.
By introducing load – which is weights – you can enhance the natural ability already there. In increasing strength, you make the player more resistant to injury.
When it comes to strength, 90% of this work is carried out in the gym environment. The conditioning part is typical achieved through cardiovascular exercise: running, jogging, cycling, rowing. Anything that opens the pores.
The principles are simple, the methods used is the secret sauce.
How does it operate?
Well, Jonny Davis will plan out the season according to the games that his team is involved in. He will take various factors into consideration, such as how the training on day one will affect training on day two and so on.
Built into that is what he terms a Games Difficulty Index, a concept he picked up from an Australian academic journal over 20 years ago and has worked on, enhanced and improved ever since.
The core of it all is to build strength at the right times, in accordance with the limitation of athlete’s bodies and previous injury history.
He believes that if you target the pelvic girdle and lower abdominals to be as strong and stable as possible, then you will not go far wrong. This year, Down had a full panel of players to choose from when they were preparing for the Tailteann Cup final; that wasn’t a coincidence.
Of course luck can always play a role in this, but if the end goal of strategic strength and conditioning work is to produce a healthy and injury-free panel, then Davis can rightly be proud of his work there.
Is it true then that some injuries are down to strength and conditioning that could be better?
Davis would contend that nothing occurs in isolation. There are a range of factors contributing to performance. You have to train the athlete so that they can meet the demands of the training and matches.
But also, understanding each player’s capacity to reach this is vital. The player’s age, their injury history, their occupation, lifestyle all come under consideration, as does how far down the pecking order they are, how many minutes they are likely to play.
“In my experience,” Davis says, “This is a new concept to GAA.”
Planning across the season has to include all factors of performance, including technical, tactical, physical and mental.
“If this isn’t in place your players are more likely to get injured as a result of being over exposed to training load,” he adds.
Training this has to be a year-round project. If the athlete is brought to their maximum, then hypertrophy is achieved.
Yeah, hypertrophy. Don’t let the fancy word put you off. Stay with us.
Think of it in this way. Say you do as many arm curls as you possibly can. The next day you’ll feel a tenderness in your bicep muscles. This is due to a series of micro-tears the exercise inflicted upon the area.
With the right intake of protein, the muscle repairs. And it grows back bigger, due to some scarring. Bigger muscles are the result of the body repairing the damage you inflicted upon it.
None of this has to be complicated.
Instead, think of three movements; push, pull and hinge. Almost everything comes from those.
The ‘Push’ could be your benchpress or shoulder press.
‘Pull’ is a pull-up or an arm curl.
‘Hinge’ is a deadlift or a squat. There are many more variations.
If you want to build strength, work out what your maximum lift is across a pull, a push and a hinge. Then work out what 85% of that is.
Do five repetitions of that weight. You’ll probably need to take a couple of minutes before your next set as your head will feel light. Do that three times. Add in some other exercises that you can comfortably do ten repetitions of. Give yourself 48 hours to recover, and go again.
Gradually increase your load over weeks. Push-Pull-Hinge. It’s boring, but it has to become your life, as Ron Burgundy would say.
Now you have the bones of it.
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Even the smallest clubs in Ireland now have some gym set-up, with many state-of-the-art, the premises hired out to personal trainers, or else the clubs operate a membership scheme for the wider community to use the facilities.
In that way, the initial outlay can be recouped. With greater apparatus comes greater expectations.
Club players now want a strength and conditioning coach who knows their stuff.
Eoin McNicholl is a former Derry goalkeeper who won an All Ireland minor title in 2002. His own background in sports science has led to a role in the Ulster Council. Along with others, he rolls out athletic development courses where club volunteers can get a background in the area and a qualification.
This creates more educated coaches, but also has the effect that clubs may not have to pay for outside expertise.
As McNicholl notes, it is important to recognise that club players are – generally – different animals to county players.
“In terms of the volume and intensity, county set-ups have more contact with their players. The people in county teams respect the sports science, they are more in tune with it than they have ever been; they are using software and technology, whatever is out there to help make those educated decisions,” says McNicholl.
“For the club player, it’s a lot of guesswork. The club coach is probably picking up a lot of the decision making here based on what they see, they feel and conversations with the player.
“Contact time is the big one. When you are involved with a county team you are there four or five times a week and you are getting to hear a lot more. You see a lot more data and you are getting more feedback.”
Over the last half decade, it has become apparent that very few players can jump straight from minors into a senior set-up. The chances of a Colm Cooper or Ronan Clarke making an instant transition are narrowing.
There’s an obvious exception to the rule in David Clifford of course, but he is just that; an exception.
While Evan Ferguson can make his senior debut for Bohemians at 14, in the GAA he would have another four years of underage action before he is permitted to play against adults.
In that respect, Gaelic football and hurling has much more in common with rugby than soccer.
Look instead at the age profile of players that are making the breakthrough on the Dublin side under Dessie Farrell; quite often they are in their early to mid-20s rather than younger.
A base of strength and conditioning is now essential. It’s not easy either for, say, a seasoned club player who has hit on a run of form in the domestic championship and gets what the average spectator would feel a deserved county call-up.
“There’s a massive difference when you can quantify what happens in clubs and what happens in county,” says Jonny Davis.
His learning is from handing over GPS units to players when they go back to their clubs, and measuring the readings against the typical county training sessions.
“A player who might have been doing well at a certain competition level, there is going to be an adaptation process and that takes time to get to a standard. You get there gradually over time. It is the same when you are bringing a player back from injury in your return to play, so that they will be able to cope with the physical demand.”
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Then, there are the obvious differences in operation as a coach for male and female teams.
Dr Wesley O’Brien, a senior lecturer in Physical Education and Coaching Science at UCC, has been the athletic development coach for Cork’s All Ireland winning camogie sides of 2023 and 2024.
There is nothing “off the peg” for taking a camogie team. Knowledge and experience has to be acquired over numerous seasons to form guiding principles.
“It’s important that we treat athletes and recognise the differences. For example muscular strength, what is expected from a top-end conditioned male athlete is going to differ significantly from a female top-end athlete,” says Dr O’Brien.
“Across all your components of strength, endurance, power, speed, agility, body composition and so on. So that’s the first thing, there are gender-related differences, standardised gender norms that differ.”
Up until recently, the study of the menstrual cycle and how it affects athletes had been almost entirely overlooked until work recently conducted by Dr Aoife Lane and her colleagues at Technological University of the Shannon, Athlone, along with the Women’s Gaelic Players’ Association.
“What they have developed is some really nice work around what we call the female athlete toolkit,” he says.
“What I like about it is that it debunks a lot of the myths surrounding the menstrual cycle. One of the most important things to look at is, if an athlete is undergoing their menstrual cycle, it is going to impair performance and participation.
“They think they are going to perform in the gym or on the pitch, worse, or with slower speed. But actually the toolkit outlined there is no evidence-based guidelines for managing performance during the menstrual cycle.”
The solution is to take each player and give them the responsibility of tracking and logging their own cycle, so that training load can be subsequently monitored.
“And if they are in the middle of their cycle, we would take an individualised approach in that. For example, if I had 25 players in the gym with me and I realised that five players had logged that they are experiencing the menstrual cycle, I would talk to them one to one because they might not be feeling great and some might be fatigued,” he continues.
“We know the risks when a player is feeling fatigued. We have to tailor our training and we cannot expect the same results from a highly-energised player.
“As a male coach working in that high-performing female environment, it’s great to have these open conversations as it is such an important part of a female athlete’s health.”
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Where does all of this go?
As Davis would state, none of this is taken in isolation.
Nutrition, tailored to training, is one variable that some teams are trying to nail. Some years ago, Galway’s hurlers were served up post-training meals that resembled pie-charts, dividing up protein and carbohydrates and vegetables according to the work on the training field.
There are areas to improve. It seems incredible and perhaps insane that there is no central bank of statistics around player injuries.
The information the GAA possess around insurance claims is made available for some academic studies.
All well and good. But does an amateur association or even its funded players’ representative body not have a duty to care to produce a detailed document of what injuries are occurring, at what time of year, after what kind of physical preparation for the weeks leading up to it?
When Davis worked for Ulster Rugby, within the IRFU system, every medical note of the players was filed, with notes created, which would form the basis for an annual report.
“Soft tissue injuries, if they were groin, hamstring, calf, what grade of a tear it might me, how long for recovery depending on how the tissue responds to the stimulus,” says Davis.
“There are many other influencing factors on that, how cautious the player is, the doctor connected to the team and how they feel, lifestyle and environmental factors, such as a student, or else someone working on a building site.”
Those that talk about the split-season for players are not aware of the reality.
One prominent Gaelic football county took all of a fortnight off a couple of years back before they were back in the gym once a week for a top-up, controlled by the conditioning coach.
As soon as their club interest finished, they immediately came in for assessment and a tailored programme until the county were collectively allowed to resume training. And as we might guess, those guidelines are often ignored by counties.
This particular offence vexes many. But for players looking to get ahead with their own personal performance and making gains in the quiet months, the vast majority are entirely invested in the process.
Trusting the process has become about following best practise, not just a snappy slogan.
