<blockquote>Ahead of the big kick-off against Shamrock Rovers at Dalymount Park on February 16, Bohemians midfielder Oscar Brennan takes bohemianfc.com behind the scenes as the team and management prepare for the 2018 season.
This is the third instalment of Oscar’s pre-season diary.</blockquote>
People might have a picture in their head of pre-season of lads doing endless laps, but the modern strength and conditioning coaches have changed all of that.
There’s a science behind everything. That’s great for us, if you ask Cian McCaffrey, our strength and conditioning coach, why we’re doing something he’ll be able to tell you – ‘this is how this relates to a match scenario’.
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Cian comes in on a Monday and Thursday and before we go out on the pitch we do prehab, injury prevention work.
Players will be on foam-rollers, doing walk-out press-ups, planks side-planks and a lot of lads who’ve been in the league a while find that bit hard.
They might be used to the old-school stuff, it’s harder than it looks – you’re trying to hold yourself up against your body weight.
If you’ve been doing prehab, then it’s straight into training.
If Cian’s not there, it’s up to lads themselves and we’ll do our prehab, Cian’s been there the last year and we know what the exercises are. We’re not babies.
Trevor and Keith are there so early, they’ve everything set-up when you get there.
People don’t see that side of it, they’re coming from work and have families but no matter how early you show up to training they’re there.
They’re not sitting around the changing-room like us, chatting and messing, they’re out on the pitch setting up, they’ve prepared the sessions weeks in advance.
We start with a circle, start with ‘Rondos’ with two lads playing piggy in the middle.
That gets you a touch of the ball, it’s usually a bit of a laugh and then we go into our warm-ups and the session goes from there.
It’s even enough, we put the two young lads in first. The two youngest guys last year are happy out because there are a few new faces and they’ve moved up the food chain a bit.
Wardy is probably the best at it, he has all of these little tricks. Rob Cornwall and Dan Casey struggle the most – two meat-head centre-halves, they haven’t a clue!
