Source: FOOTYMAD
Fitness the key to success
Boothroyd: "Players will definitely get very fit" Coventry City manager Aidy Boothroyd has warned his players they will have to work hard to get fit and remain so for the season and that means they will have to work hard. Boothroyd has his own ideas about fitness and training methods and has always insisted on having fit and productive teams and will work his players hard in the coming weeks so they are fit and ready to take on Portsmouth on the opening day of the new season. Boothroyd told The CT, “There will be loads of fitness work but what I do is a lot of disguised running,” // '); // ]]> “I am not really into running up mountains because I don’t see many mountains on football pitches, so I tend to work within the parameters of the pitch because that’s where you do your work, so I try to be as specific as I possibly can be." “If you can be specific then the players understand where they are on the pitch, and if there is any running to be done it is with the stimulation of being with a ball in a bigger area, so it is disguised, but they will definitely get very fit.” Boothroyd takes his team to an Austrian training camp next week , but he won't be indulging in any high altitude training, just using the facilities at the village of Obertraun, which is in the Salzkammergut region and near Lake Hallstatt. Coventry City will have the use of the purpose built facilities at the National Sports and Recreation Centre, which has its own training pitches. Speaking about the reasoning behind the Austrian training session, Boothroyd explained, “There are a lot of benefits from working at a higher altitude because the oxygen up there is less and therefore you have to work harder and then when you do come down to altitude they feel the benefit." “I am very keen to get them off to a good and steady start to the season. I know the club has done that before and not maintained it, but it is like running a marathon and you have got to put the miles in to do it." “So we are going to have three or four sessions a day, whether that is up doing little technical things that are not particularly difficult but relevant to what we do, practising throw-ins or doing momentum sessions and looking at pieces of video, or maybe something completely off the wall and different, bu it all comes together and ensures that we do better than we did last year. // '); // ]]> “I do like fit sides because I think it is important. Any team has got to be tactically flexible and any team has got to be fit and difficult to beat and, of course, able to score goals. That’s the big thing with me, scoring goals.” Although Coventry City have not planned any friendly games while they are in Austria, Boothroyd is open to the idea that one may be arranged, he said, “I haven’t decided about a game out there yet. I am leaning towards it, giving everyone 45 minutes at the end of it and then when we come back we play Nuneaton pretty much straight away but I want to do some training first for 12 or 13 days. They have had a series of tests and now we will crack on to Austria and get going.”
