S&C coaches are among the most sought-after figures in the GAA, but why is this – and what exactly do they do?
Declan Bogue 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’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 known of who does it, what it involves, and why. 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.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.
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. 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.
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.Advertisement 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.
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. Training this has to be a year-round project. If the athlete is brought to their maximum, then hypertrophy is achieved.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.
Gradually increase your load over weeks. Push-Pull-Hinge. It’s boring, but it has to become your life, as Ron Burgundy would say.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.Club players now want a strength and conditioning coach who knows their stuff.
“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.
There’s an obvious exception to the rule in David Clifford of course, but he is just that; an exception. 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. 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.
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.
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