MILLWALL are monitoring players’ fitness work through an app – with boss Gary Rowett revealing that there is competition in the squad to post the most impressive numbers.
The Lions players are at home working on their individual fitness programmes and are not due back to Calmont Road for at least another two weeks.
Rowett also revealed one of his fitness staff brought something amusing to his attention about Billy Mitchell.
“We downloaded Strava for everyone before they left, it’s quite a standard sort of running/cycling app which I use personally anyway,” Rowett said. “It’s quite a good way of doing it, it tracks very, very basic metrics and most people who are out there running will know what Strava is.
“We’ve got a group and you can see who’s done what for the week. You can’t really gauge a top speed off it necessarily, but you get an average speed, average distance.
“It’s fairly basic, there are better systems out there but we didn’t have those when the players broke up. But this is good enough. It’s quite good because there’s a bit of competition with it.
“One of the sports scientists came back to me the other day and said, ‘For some reason, Billy Mitchell’s been on a 15km run!’ Which is typical of Billy. And with Billy we might need to ring him to say that while you want to stay fit, we have to make sure it’s appropriate and you don’t overdo it.
“Because of course the players aren’t used to running on pavements, if that’s where they’re running. Most of them have got access to grass and we’re obviously trying to encourage them to mix the surfaces up and use grass wherever they can.”
Image: @MillwallFC