SaintsFan wrote:
Endurance is built up over time. There is no other way. What Walmsley is lacking is endurance fitness, not fitness per se.
If you're wanting to run a marathon when all you've run is a 10k you would need at least six months to build up the endurance needed in order for you to complete the marathon without making yourself very ill. So it is with Walmsley and bridging the gap between part-timer and fulltimer.
There are two types of fitness, aerobic and anaerobic. Aerobic is used in long slow workouts whilst anaerobic is used in short sharp workouts such as sprinting or power lifting.
The endurance you allude to when it comes to marathon running isn't usually a fitness worry, it's due to muscle fatigue. If someone is a decent 10k runner, they will have ran longer distances before and could probably have a fair crack at a marathon if muscle fatigue wasn't an issue. They'll have a good level of aerobic fitness already and probably would be able to finish a marathon, again if muscle fatigue wasn't an issue.
In terms of the fitness levels to play a game of rugby league, particularly as a prop you cross between both aerobic and anaerobic. Defensive shuttles, making a tackle and having a drive up are all using the anaerobic side of fitness whilst the general game play, tracking the ball is aerobic.
Walmsley seems to struggle with recovery from anaerobic exercise, by which I mean after he has done some intensive exercise he is blowing and takes a while to get his breath back. A good way of improving this is to get plenty of high intensity interval training into his regime and work on doing some hill sprints to increase his anaerobic threshold. This can produce fairly rapid improvements in a relatively short period of time - 2 months or so is a long time to make gains initially. Walmsley has been with the club quite a while now including pre-season so I would have hoped for his fitness levels to be slightly higher.
However, I'm sure the conditioners as Saints have spotted this already and are in the process of improving it.