12 June 2007
VIDEO: England prepare for China

While the summer holidays are on everyone elses minds, the England players get done to some serious training.

The England Women's squad may not be having too many regular get-togethers before their World Cup campaign gets underway in earnest this summer, but that has not stopped Hope Powell’s players from maintaining high fitness levels.

With most of the players either occupied by their jobs or families, it is difficult for them to train together or for Dawn Scott, the squad’s exercise scientist, to monitor their fitness levels.

But by using a network of facilities and staff up and down the country, and by tapping into the players’ professionalism and enthusiasm, Dawn has been able to keep their fitness programmes going.

"One of the big challenges here is that our players are spread out all over the country," she said.

"Some have families and the majority of them work full-time. We employ regional trainers so that the players can do supervised sessions and we make sure there are no issues with technique or injury.

"We try to make it so that they don’t have to travel far and we can clarify what we want and what we expect from the programme so that it can be tailored to the individual players.

"Then I can get all that information back in terms of heart-rate as well as the strength programmes they’re doing, the weights they’re lifting, the set-reps, so that we’re all pushing towards the same goal."

And while some of England rivals are already in training camps ahead of August’s finals, the Three Lions will work differently.

"Training camps sometimes make it easier in terms of contact with players but sometimes you think the players need a break from that environment," added Scott at the most recent session, which was held at the British Olympic Medical Institute in Harrow in early June.

"This is the first full week of training they’ve had back after two weeks regeneration where they were told to do a little training just to keep themselves ticking over. In the second week some of them were texting and phoning saying that they couldn’t wait to back into it.

"Certainly the feedback I have had this week is that they enjoy the sessions and hopefully that’ll keep going. It’s certainly challenging. Sometimes you’re training five days a week and sometimes twice a day so the recovery aspect is important as well."

The squad train throughout the year with agendas agreed between their clubs and the national side. "We’ve gone through a series of tests over a few months looking at individual requirements in terms of strength, power, speed and aerobic fitness.

"From that there is then a generic programme we put together but within it, it is individual in terms of strength work as well as aerobic demands and speed work. Then I’ll give that to the players and integrate it within the club. We always work with the clubs and certainly not in isolation.

"We look at the players and our needs and the support staff we have with the players and so from the medical point of view we have done medical screening and we have psychologists working with us and then there’s the technical element too so we work as a team.

"We’ve approached it from our experts’ point of view and what we think is important. We think we’ve got in place a good programme to physically develop the players to their maximum so that hopefully they can do as well as possible in the World Cup."