Gian Piero Ventrone released an interview with La Gazzetta Dello Sport last week explaining his work at Tottenham under Antonio Conte, why Serie A players get injured more frequently than in the Premier League and why individual training sessions will be the future of football.
The 62-year-old died on Thursday in Naples due to fulminant leukaemia. He was one of Italy’s most prominent fitness coaches, having worked with some of the best managers in the country, from Marcello Lippi to Antonio Conte.
Last week, he had released an interview with La Gazzetta Dello Sport, explaining the secrets of his work and his approach.
“I have three rules. One: avoid injuries in training. Two: limitate the number of muscle injuries during games. Three: grand a high-level athletic performance. Pre-season preparations changed in 2005 with the studies of professor Di Prampero on metabolic power, GPS and other parameters,” he said.
Ventrone was asked why Premier League clubs tend to have fewer injuries than those of Serie A.
“The difference is that in England the recovery time is lower,” he explained.
“There are fewer interruptions. At Tottenham, we train by keeping the game’s pace. Our sessions are very long: one hour and a half, sometimes two. Not 50 minutes. Conte and I have developed a similar culture and method based on the adaptability to the suffering of the athlete and on his ability not to surrender to fatigue easily.”
Ventrone and Conte had been working together at Juventus before reuniting in North London where the Italian tactician arrived less than a week ago. Ventrone was Juventus’ fitness coach also when Conte played for the Old Lady and was part of Lippi’s staff in 2006 when Italy won the World Cup.
He didn’t follow Conte at Inter in 2019 as he was working at Guangzhou under another Italy great, Fabio Cannavaro.
During his interview with Gazzetta, Ventrone explained his training philosophy in North London.
“Our players haven’t had many muscle problems since we started. The real problem is that there are many games,” he said.
“In terms of strength, at Tottenham, we take care of control’s movement in unstable conditions. The player must adapt to different movements. There is no time to train on strength. When you don’t play much, you can program some long-term cycles, but now we have 13 games in 43 days and it would be useless and even counterproductive to train the strength.
“Rather than make footballers stronger, we are focusing on their balance so that the machine is always ready.
“We are going towards individual work, following parameters that follow the biotype and the player’s previous experience. Team work will make less sense in the future. A fast player must be trained in a certain way, a slow one in another.
“The same menu for everyone, with just a few arrangments, brings us far from the right path. Son has big quadriceps, it’s useless to develop them further. His best quality is pace. Again, we want to exalt his machine’s balance more than the strength.”
Pic credit: Juventus FC