News round-up: Seán Moran talks to a top sports scientist Niall Moyna, who believes unregulated demands on young players are causing real problems.

Unregulated demands on young players are contributing to an upsurge in chronic injuries and endangering their academic progress, according to a top sports scientist.

Niall Moyna, exercise physiology expert at Dublin City University and convenor of last November's GAA national coaching conference, traces the problems to unrealistic expectations at county board level.

"Intercounty managers come in and are landed with unrealistic expectations. They start from scratch and there is no follow-through from the fitness and conditioning work that his predecessor has done."

Young players are particularly at risk as there are multiple demands placed on their availability. At the age of 19 or 20, players can be lining out for over six teams - twice that if they happen to be dual players. Yet many intercounty managers are reluctant to make any allowance for training undergone at college in the early weeks of the year, therefore forcing players to trek backwards and forwards to county training no matter how far away they are based.

As coach of DCU's Sigerson Cup team, Moyna is all too aware of the practical problems as well as the theoretical.

"Not a single intercounty manager has contacted me about any of his players based here. It's like asking a thoroughbred horse to do a speed workout, go back to the stable and go out again in the evening for a 20-mile gallop with a different trainer. Then ask him to race on Friday, Saturday and Sunday," he says. "I had to laugh at the number of Premiership players in England complaining over Christmas about having to play two matches in three days. Here we make young players do that at the drop of a hat."

Injuries in the age group have rocketed and the intensive demands also impact on students' ability to find the time for study.

"Constant heavy training is like hitting the knee with a sledge hammer night after night. We are seeing chronic injuries on a scale unheard of in the 1980s. And all this travelling to and from college for county training and getting home at midnight obviously has an effect on academic careers."

Paraic Duffy, chair of the GAA's Coaching and Games Development Committee, shares Moyna's concerns and says there is a growing awareness at national level that something needs to be done about demands on young players. "When I was chairing GAC a couple of years ago, we proposed deferring the under-21 intercounty championship until the summer with the final in autumn. But having accepted that, all the provinces went ahead and organised their championships in the spring.

"A couple of things are happening now. There is a proposal that there should be minor or under-21 competitions early in the year when the third-level colleges are in training. We're trying to separate under-21 and Sigerson activity so that even if they are on at the same time of the year, they don't take place at exactly the same time."

Moyna argues that the severe training modules adopted by some counties don't even achieve the desired effect.

"If I could implement one change it would be that we see an intercounty off-season from the All-Ireland to February with severe penalties for any county breaching that. Good off-season conditioning programmes, which would only take up 20 minutes three times a week would cut by 70 per cent the sort of physical work that counties routinely do every new year."

There is an increasing realisation that sports scientists have a role to play in the preparation of teams and the protection of players. In an ideal world there would be someone in each county to monitor training methods and their impact and maintain continuity from one management to the next.

"There is a problem with the one-size-fits-all approach. It wastes time. Say you're on a county panel. Your body fat is excellent, your fitness is in the top 10 percentile but your backwards speed and backwards acceleration need work. What's the point in making you run around a field 50 times?"

Duffy feels proposed rule changes are impractical because they won't get support. But he believes there is a consensus that practices will have to change.

"I think to be fair there is a growing awareness of the problem. Even here in the school (he is headmaster of St McCartan's, Monaghan) with the McRory Cup team we have noticed a better level of awareness among the clubs in the past five years." Moyna agrees. "I think people are starting to see the issues but at the moment we don't have enough expertise."