Tipperary leave the Galway hills behind

One of the sharper contrasts between the All-Ireland preparations of Galway and Tipperary can be found in the backroom team, or, more specifically, in the minds of the respective team trainers.

Under Mike McNamara, Galway have abandoned the limits of their physical preparations and taken fitness to its purest. Under Jim Kilty, Tipperary have turned fitness into an art and taken the endurance out of endurance training.

The aims and purposes of both training regimes are the same. Speed, skill and stamina will be necessary in equal measure over the course of the 70 minutes. There is no hiding place for the unfit. As in any other sport, however, no one method of training is guaranteed to bring success.

McNamara joined the Galway set-up when Noel Lane took over as manager last year. Though he would share the selection duties, McNamara's main purpose lay in physical preparations, and from the first week in November he started his team on the hill sessions near Loughrea. Excuses would fall on deaf ears.

It was around the same time that Kilty met up with Tipperary manager Nicky English. The Dublin and Derry football management teams had experimented with his techniques, honed in athletics. English was sold and Kilty started taking training sessions from January.

While the Galway players ran hills, Tipperary would work on their reactions. While Galway punished themselves with 20-minute runs, the Tipperary players would repeat short sprints. Come the summer, both teams were fit, hungry and razor sharp.

"Running is not the key issue in our approach," explains Kilty. "It's getting away from the old method of running hills and running laps and is based more on training as you play. What these players need is the ability to repeat speed, and what we get people to do is to focus on the competitive side of their sport.

"So we're not running them up mountains, or even doing 200 metre sprints. I think the modern game is getting away from that. We concentrate instead on runs of 20 to 40 metres, working on acceleration and things like that."

Discipline is the core of both training methods. Whether they are running 20 metres or 20 minutes, the approach is the same: keep doing it until it's done right. Skill is never far away either.

McNamara's demanding physical training is as much about producing a psychological edge, and for him, to train without pain is to train without gain.

"My approach to training is very, very simple. You assess the people you have gathered around you and make out a programme to bring them to physical fitness. They're now calling my style of training 'the Clare style', but it's not: it's my style and it's not different than any other style except that I like people to work extremely hard on their fitness levels before we go hurling.

"And I like training to be under extreme conditions because it mentally hardens people up rather than doing the same thing indoors and being nice and comfortable and warm in a big gym in January.

"My system operates outdoors, and a team that suffers together will more often than not bond, gel and play well together."

The endurance approach gets much less attention under Kilty. He feels that hill repetitions and long running should be left to the distance runners, as that creates more speed endurance, something that you don't actually need in the course of a match.

"Of course Nicky knows the importance of fitness, but the aim here is more in fundamental motor skills, getting players more skilful with speed and precision.

"And all the training is done in the context of the skill of the game. So if they are running these ladders or whatever, they would always have the hurl in their hand and then the ball at the end."

When McNamara first came to Galway, he found a team he felt needed more stamina and endurance. Few people doubt that he has now unearthed that. The only thing now standing between more All-Ireland success is a team with their own method of preparation but with equal ability to win.