M&F: What does a pre-season strength and conditioning session involve?

JH: We’ll do deadlifts, squats, bentover rows, glute bridges and Romanian
deadlifts as well as calf work, things  like that. We might also do some power movements like high pulls, deadlift to high pulls, cleans and Olympic lifting to keep that side of things ticking over. Each phase lasts three or four weeks. In the hypertrophy phase we’ll always work in sets of 10-12 reps, maybe more. In the strength phases we’ll do six reps maximum. We generally take the weights down across the board pre-season and make sure technique is spot on. There’s no point lifting massive weights if your movement is terrible and you’re not recruiting the right muscles. We’ll normally start with a pre-training session where we focus on mobility. We’ll do some foam rolling, dynamic stretching and some mini-band work to switch on the muscles, prepare ourselves for the session and gain some robustness against injury.