SWIMMING WITH SHARKS

To survive up to 63 high-speed collisions per match (impacts that would floor the average man) professional rugby players are put through a rigorous training regime, virtually year-round.

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It's in pre-season, though, when they put in the real graft: the foundations laid that will see them through a gruelling ten-month campaign. Just before the 22-23 season, Sam Rider spent a day with Sale Sharks - one of the best teams in the Premiership - to find out exactly what's required of these elite-level athletes.

It’s a balmy, late-August morning at Sale Sharks’ High Performance Training Centre in Carrington,

West Manchester. The players are days away from the opening match of the 2022-23 Premiership season, determined to better last year’s sixth-place finish.

“Discipline” and “physicality”. Those are the buzzwords this season, Sharks’ co-head of strength and conditioning, Rick Swaby, tells me when we enter the gym. The weights room itself is spread across a giant warehouse in the centre of the facility that was formerly Manchester City’s training ground.

Flanking the sides of the room are rows of BLK-BOX power racks, cable stations, GHD machines and punch bags. In the middle, towering forwards – some as wide as they are tall – as the team nonchalantly work through a monster set of trap bar deadlifts, Bulgarian split squats, plyometric bounds and band-resisted vertical jumps. For now, they’re mostly ignoring the double-decker row of rubber clad dumbbells, which max out at 75kg.

Technically, pre-season began the moment the final whistle went on the previous campaign. The Rugby Football Union mandates all professional players need to take five weeks off between seasons, but Swaby explains they all have individual training plans to follow, to keep their bodies strong and cardiovascular fitness ticking over.