The players will return on Friday for a pre pre-season assessment, before the full pre-season training schedule gets underway on Monday.
Dale’s Head of Analysis, Dan Fradley, explains what will happen on Friday, and says he’s expecting the players to return in good shape.
“During the off season the lads have recovered, they’ve rested, they’ve been away on holiday, but they’ve also been doing their off season programmes with Ross [Preston] and Kevin [Gibbins],” Dan told Dale Player.
“They’ve been doing a lot of strength work in the gym, but not so much running because we want to try and provide them with a different training stimulus during this phase of the year. They’ve been in the gym on a Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and they’ve had to fulfill a certain number of sessions during the off season to get them into the condition that we want physically.
“That leads us into Friday where we’ll do a lot of body measurements – standard stuff like height, mass and body fats. We’ll also get the heart rate monitors set up and ready for the start of pre-season on Monday. We’ll then go into the testing next week where we’ll being doing things like aerobic testing and the dreaded track day, which is really testing for the boys but is also a solid base to get your pre-season started.”
He continued: “Everything that we’ll do tomorrow [Friday] we did at the back end of last season so we’ve got some sort of comparison as to how the lads were when we finished the season and how they’re going to start pre-season.
“Even though we’ve had around six weeks off, the lads won’t be in too much of a different shape as to what they were at the end of last season because they’ve all been doing their close season programmes, so we’re not worried at all. They’ll come back in good shape and that fitness will only improve as pre-season goes on.”
The full interview with Dan is available on Dale Player.