The Proteas players remain under obligation to continue their fitness and conditioning responsibilities, despite the nationwide lockdown in South Africa, writes ANDRE HUISAMEN.
The team’s strength and conditioning coach Tumi Masekela reiterated the importance of the players to stay active and continue regular movement to maintain their fitness levels.
Many players have in recent days shared some of their home workouts on social media and provided viewers with a glimpse of how they’re improvising to remain active.
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Masekela provided all players with specialised training programmes to build on the fitness levels they’ve achieved over the past few months and to be ready for competition mode once everything has blown over.
‘We’ve got time now to work with players in terms of addressing all the small niggles so that they have enough time to rest and are able to do the rehab programmes.
‘The problem with Covid-19 is that everything has to be done remotely for training and communication. We can’t do our normal training where we continuously assess players on a day to day basis and adjust programmes accordingly.’
Masekela believes it is of high importance that the players get the right results on their own during lockdown and prevent injuries while doing so by staying active as frequently as possible.
Most players have proper gyms at home with the necessary equipment to perform decent workouts on their own time.
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These programmes include a lot of running, cycling and swimming, while a big focus is also placed on cardio work.
‘It is extremely important for the Proteas to continue their fitness programmes because during these uncertain times a cure could be synthesised within the next week or the lockdown could flatten the curve quite quickly, which means we could find ourselves back into our schedules quite quickly,’ said Masekela.
‘The players then need to be ready to participate immediately once everything is lifted and we have free range of movement once again.’
On the other hand if the virus takes a longer period of time to settle then Masekela doesn’t want the players to lose the fitness base that they’ve built up in the time.
‘For them it is crucial that they continue with their training programmes so that they can maintain what they have over the past few years, because these guys have worked a lot to get to where they are today. They wouldn’t want to lose that base due to the lockdown,’ Masekela concluded.
