Michael Fennelly feels every team should be back training in November

He backs it up, too.

If Michael Fennelly was an inter-county manager, he'd have his team back training in November. With the background the recently retired Kilkenny legend has in Strength and Conditioning and athletic performance, having been a lecturer of the subject in Limerick I.T, he's in a good place to make such claims.

“There’s some research out there at the moment. You have to build up your training load on a weekly basis and in a steady state, just to ensure you’re not spiking from one week to the next. You can’t be going nice and handy in training and then have a savagely intense game," he told us at Peptalk All-Ireland Games Initiative Launch.

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Fennelly is talking about injury prevention. He's talking about building that base. His reasoning is clear and it makes sense. If players want to give themselves the best possible chance to be flying fit in mid-summer, a solid pre-season is a must. A solid pre-season involves an early start.

"With the way the fixtures are this year, the first league game is at the end of January. For me, for teams to prevent injuries and to get ready for those games, those league games are like championship, you actually need to get back training in November, and get a bit of gym work in. Get a bit of mobility, get a good base of running.

"Teams will end up going back earlier and earlier. If I was a manager or a coach, I’d want my teams back at that time, because you need two months of pre-season, because Christmas is going to be two weeks. You might have ten weeks of training there before your first training, but you do need that, for that base," he added.

A widely believed myth in the modern game is that the gym is all about getting big and putting on weight. To Fennelly, it's about getting powerful, mobile and ensuring your body is strong enough to withstand the blows you'll take in games. To prevent injuries.

"If you miss out on that base, you’ll end up with injuries down the line, lads trying to catch up by doing things they shouldn’t be doing.

"Pre-season is very important - to get that right. There are a lot of games coming up. Those National League games are running off every week. That round-robin thing is another 4 or 5 games after," added the Kilkenny man.

The hurling championship has been restructured this year. A round-robin series will be played in all of the provinces, and the main takeaway is that hurlers will have way more intercounty games.

“It’s going to be interesting to see how that works out this year. It’s going to be monitored. It’s going to be up to S and C coaches to balance that," he added.

Put simply, Fennelly feels it's wrong and unrealistic. He's put forward an alternative structure for the hurling season.

He would merge the National League and the round-robin games in the championship together. He would scrap the provinces.

“I wish the year would be shorter, have it a six or seven month year. The league and the round-robin - are they not the same thing at this stage? I haven’t looked into it a whole lot, but to me, the league is like championship. Then you’ve a break of two months, and then you’ve championship again in two months.

“Why not just accumulate the games together, and just have one big group, or one big championship between the teams?" He asked.

“We have only two provinces, one is artificial. Leinster is artificial, it’s going, thank God, that’s a step in the right direction that they will get rid of it. Galway are in Leinster, but Galway are from Connacht, so to me, the provinces are gone, they’re dead.

“If Kilkenny are playing Galway in the first round of the championship. Play Cork, play Waterford. Play home and away games, you can’t beat that excitement. I know the round-robin is like that.

He loved the excitement and the buzz of travelling away for games.

“I remember my parents, they loved the league, because just say, when we were playing Clare, you’d go down to Ennis on a Saturday night and just enjoy the weekend.

The championship didn't give him that.

“In championship then, it just ends up being a let-down, because you’ve the same teams playing each other every single year anyway. So why not just open up the whole thing and make it more exciting.”

He makes a good point.

Michael Fennelly was at the launch of Peptalk’s All Ireland Games, an intercompany wellbeing challenge that allows companies all over Ireland to compete against each other. To get your company signed up check out http://www.peptalk.ie/all-ireland-games.