Question:
I am a keeper at Rugby School in England. In a week’s time, I am going to South Africa for a month and I was just wondering if you could advise me on a type of acclimatisation training programme I could do before I start training properly when I get back in August from South Africa.
Answer:
The key to acclimatisation training is trying to recreate the conditions you’ll be training in. There are a lot of variables, time, temperature, humidity, etc. I don’t know that you can reproduce them all. The key is to reproduce what you can. If you know generally what the temperature is going to be like when you get back to England, try to train at a time of the day where they’re comparable. Obviously time is going to be a tough thing to replicate. With jet lag and time differences, it may not even be worthwhile. The other thing to take into consideration is how long you’ll have to acclimate when you get back, specifically when you’ll start to play games again. On particularly long trips, acclimatisation is noble thing to take on, but simply training while you’re away could well be enough.
I’m from Ireland and was recently in Singapore. I don’t have any suggestions for before you leave, but when you arrive I found some methods very useful fo preventing overheating:
Ice baths
Ice towels – bring a small cool bag and fill with ice, place your water and a towel in it and keep and the back of the net (If seriously hot, just keep the towel around your neck during training, it really helps keep you cool)
Run under water system during warm up – very refreshing! 😛
Not much, hope it helps and Good Luck!