Yesterday brought the curtain down on the 2016 GAA season for us and it culminated in winning the Division 1 League title with Kilcar. Apart from bits and pieces of involvement with various teams, I hadn’t worked with a team since 2011. When I sat down with Martin McHugh and Aaron Kyles in January, coming on board with Kilcar was the furthest thing from my mind.

My philosophy is very simple. Athletes need to be fundamentally strong enough to train at a high level. Lacking a foundation means that something will collapse further down the line and this usually manifests itself in soft tissue injuries – hamstring, quad, calf, groin, ankle sprain etc. Get strong, stay strong, train well, recover better. If you think of progress like a ‘linear curve’ - Avoid injury and performance will increase. If everybody is capable of training at an appropriate level, all of the time, fitness increases, strength increases, competition for places increases, tactical awareness increases etc – This is what I believe team managers want. On this, myself and Aaron have very similar philosophies.

So I agreed to come on board for 2016 to see what we could achieve in terms of Physical preparation and performance. The first thing was to address the chronic, reoccurring injuries. These were players who always seemed to be injured and some of whom hadn’t trained in 4-6 months, as well as players who were on a list for hip and groin surgery. Then it was a case of ensuring that each player was capable of tolerating the training load. Finally, it was finding a system of maintaining performance throughout the season.

Emma McSweeney, the club physio, has done a spectacular job. Fantastic to work alongside, she kept everybody in superb shape throughout the year, and her diagnostic and treatment skills are second to none. This time last year Aaron Kyles was in Dallas, Texas getting 12 College Athletes ready for the NFL Combine with CES Performance. This is the first time that I have been able to work so closely with an S&C Coach and it has been profound. I have many S&C friends who are as good as you will get anywhere in the world. Aaron’s real skill is in taking his immense knowledge and implementing it to the nth degree. From my point of view what he has managed to do this season with Kilcar is nothing short of ground breaking and here is why:

Conservative injury rates in a typical GAA team are between 8% and 11.5% based on sessions lost to soft tissue injuries. This year, between the start of February and the County Final we achieved 1.8%! That translates into a season with 0 Hamstring injuries; 0 Groin Injuries; 0 Knee or Ankle ligament injuries; 0 MRI Scans or referrals to Orthopaedic Surgeons. Of the 3 players who did pick up a soft tissue injury (2 calf & 1 quad, which still irks me!) none was out for any longer than 2 ½ weeks. 100% Injury Prevention is not possible. However, Injury Reduction must be to the fore of any team.

The interesting thing is that this is not rocket science – it is all in planning and implementation and everybody working together to ensure that the desired outcome is achieved.

Great credit must go to the super bunch of players who took what was being done on board and bought into the system. This was critical and if there was one weak link, everything could have collapsed. Also, Martin McHugh and his backroom team have been a pleasure to work with and put huge trust into what was being done. Very often we see managers panicking that a team isn’t fit enough, or strong enough, or training hard enough, and the advice of the S&C guys is ignored, and they revert to old methods of over-training and players break down. This didn’t happen this year and I applaud Martin’s approach.

All of this does not necessarily mean that you will win everything as we saw in the County final, beaten by Glenswilly, the better team on the day. However, I believe our role was to get the team through the season to the County final, with minimum injury, no long term joint harm, and to be capable of being able to train at the required level. I am very grateful to have been able to work alongside Aaron, Emma, Martin, and all involved, to be able to achieve this.

An injury rate of below 5% is not the new standard – It is just the way it has to be.

-Tommy Gallagher Injury Management