The Sharks have started their pre-season preparations ahead of next year’s Super Rugby tournament and assistant coach Grant Bashford has warned there will be no place to hide for unfit players.

Sport24

Bashford said body fat measurements will be done regularly to ensure the players stay fit.

“We’re going to be really hard on that this campaign, the guys will be going away over Christmas but will be given programmes to work from and there will be structures in place to take care of anyone who hasn’t lived up to what they need to do for the coming season. We’re going to take a hard line on that going into the new year,” Bashford said.

Bashford said their early pre-season training will be different than previous years. Last season they focused on a conditioning programme and players didn’t use a rugby ball in training until January. “But skill work has been introduced early and every day there is ball play along with conditioning.

“We started last week with a group of 25 players, while the Boks and those players who carried a heavy workload over the course of the season were given an extra week.

“As of Monday this week, we had our entire squad back.”

There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to their pre-season regime with different groups catered for by their varying needs.

“The players have all been put into different groups for different types of training – we’ve tried to be specific with who needs what.

“We also have a rehab group for recovering players because we had a few operations in the off-season. Everyone is doing exactly what we feel they need to do, we aren’t using a generic system that everyone conforms to,” said Bashford.