Tyrone stars’ cross-training methods might be a game-changer for footballers

Keeping themselves busy.

Inter-county level players barely ever get a break from the game. It starts off in January with the league, there's college competitions, club training, county training, and it goes all the way through the summer and up until the winter depending on your team's progress. Obviously, after so much training and games, they need a break from the sliotar or the football. It's not in their make-up to laze around and do nothing, so our players look for other ways to keep themselves in ticking over both mentally and physically. Tyrone star Colm Cavanagh was speaking on The GAA Hour Show on Thursday when he revealed his and his brother Sean's tendencies for playing basketball during the football off-season. Not only is it a good way of keeping fit, according to the Moy club man, but it's also beneficial for keeping the eye-in.

"Only in the winter, we don't get much time. We would have played a good bit growing up, but my last time playing it would probably have been for schools and that, but we play every winter and we find that there's plenty of transferable skills in it as well," he began.

The Cavanaghs won't be playing too much basketball this month, as their club have an Ulster intermediate semi-final coming up in two weeks, but when that run is over, they'll be straight out to the courts. https://twitter.com/SeanCavanagh14/status/917091468552146944

"Every winter, we get maybe 10 or 12 lads and we go to either Armagh or wherever and we play once or twice a week," he said.

The Cavanaghs aren't the only gaelic footballers playing basketball during their time off. Both Aidan O'Shea and Kieran Donaghy play at a high level with their respective clubs, as do many more. Indeed, the younger of the Cavanagh brothers went on to talk about the sibling rivalry that he and Sean have, and that even from a young age playing on the Playstation, it was always a competition between them.

""We still, even now, playing basketball or playing squash in the off-season, we'd barely ever come out talking after a game," "Being the younger brother I always wanted to emulate him, and I was trying to do out do him in anything we done. I suppose, as well, we did everything together, between playing Playstations, computers, out playing football or basketball, we did everything together," he said.

Meanwhile, fellow Tyrone players Mark Bradley, Tiernan and Conall McCann have been performing some almighty work-outs in the gym. Nippy corner forward Bradley's 30 minute work-out, which included two 1.6km runs, 300 squats, 200 press ups and 100 pull ups sounds nothing short of torturous. But he was back at it again, in good company with the McCann brothers, and their routine which consisted of Pull ups, military press, back squats and many more exercises sounds excruciating. You can listen to the full Cavanagh interview (From 26"00'), and much more from Thursday's GAA Hour Show right here. https://soundcloud.com/sportsjoe-gaa-hour/colm-cavanagh-interview-galway-fixtures-mess-david-cliffords-decision