GIANTS ENJOY HEAT AND ICE RECOVERY

In what is a busy pre-season schedule, the Giants team enjoyed some Heat and Ice recovery as part of their training regime.

We visited HICE in Brighouse, which is a specialist Contrast Therapy centre in Brighouse, kitted out with three Ice Baths, a sauna and a Hyperbaric Oxygen Chamber, enabling athletes and regular members of the public to recover, this ensures that our athletes are in top shape and fitness, ready to attack the remaining training days on-field.

Taking it in turns in groups, the players would spend around fifteen minutes in the sauna, before choosing which Ice Bath to enjoy for a limited period of time, before then returning into the sauna, this process helps the bodies vital organs and muscles recover from increased training load.

Head of Performance Gareth Whittaker oversaw the recovery session and had this to say.

"It's been a great venue for us to come down to, 
It falls nicely in our training week and we come down on a Wednesday, so we do two days of training back to back and put the lads under the pump and then we get a recovery day on the Wednesday that allows us to reset, then we can go hard again on the Thursday and the Friday. 

"So down at HICE, they've got saunas and they've got ice baths. There's loads of research out there saying about heat and ice for adaptation from training and recovery. 
So the guys look after us and we use the heat and ice to promote recovery on the Wednesday, and a big bonus as well that the lads love is they do a great coffee. So it gets the lads together. 
It's a bit of a relaxed environment as well and they can have a brew and have a chat between themselves, why also doing some recovery that helps us benefit and gets us ready to train for the Thursday and the Friday. 

"Obviously, Rugby League is a team sport and getting those times where lads are a little bit more chilled out and we're not out on the field and working hard and we can just have them conversations and especially for the new guys as well, the new signings that we've got, you'll find out a little bit more about them just sitting down, having a coffee, talking about their background, where they've come from. It's really good from a team building point of view and building a bit of cohesion away from the rugby field. 


"Yeah, I've been really impressed with how the guys have come in and how they've welcomed me as well, everyone's been really good and bought into what I've I've tried to instil in the programme. We've had a good four weeks, but we've still got to keep pushing hard as well, we've got a 10 day camp in Tenerife coming up in a week and a half so then we'll raise it up again."