David Beckham can thank Milanello training regime for return to fold
As David Beckham emerged after a massage and an hour of Pilates on his last day at the renowned Milanello ‘laboratory’, he looked like a man who had just spent five months on a health farm rather than undergoing the most thorough training programme of his life.
By Jeremy Wilson
Published: 5:00PM BST 09 Jun 2009 Daily Telegraph
Best foot forward: thanks to the training regime at AC Milan, David Beckham believes ‘f’itness-wise, I’m the best I’ve been for a long time’ Photo: REUTERS
Tanned, lean and in perhaps the best physical condition of his career, he would again keep World Cup winners Ronaldinho and Gennaro Gattuso on the bench for AC Milan’s final match of the Serie A season before joining up with England and winning his 111th cap in Saturday’s 4-0 win against Kazakhstan.
With Wayne Rooney, Frank Lampard and Gareth Barry, he is one of only four players to have featured in each of the six World Cup qualifiers. The once perennial debate about whether he is worth his place in the England squad has also been quietly settled. So just how has Beckham moved out of the international wilderness almost three years ago to be such an integral part of Fabio Capello’s emerging squad?
The seeds for this latest and most unlikely revival were sown during two days that Beckham spent at the Milanello training base the week before Christmas with the club’s medical director Jean-Pierre Meersseman, a Belgian kinesiologist studying how the body functions and moves.
Beckham was taken through a series of tests and, while Meersseman concluded that the former England captain had the natural fitness to emulate Paolo Maldini by playing into his forties, he wanted to address three specific issues. Beckham’s aerobic capacity was considered to be one of his main assets but improvable while a special programme to strengthen his upper legs was also recommended.
However, AC Milan’s attention to detail was most underlined by the requirement that Beckham should wear a small support in his mouth until some dental work was completed to fill a tiny gap in a tooth. It was felt that this could be affecting his balance and, potentially, even his fitness. In the past, Milan had healed a back injury to Clarence Seedorf by fixing a similar dental problem. Click to read rest of article
“We have totally eliminated the use of pharmaceuticals of any kind”The chiropractor is top man and all the medical people take their lead from him.
With the NICE guidelines, It wont be long before the same happens here.
