The joys of weights: Chelsea pumping iron again for the good (and some bad)

Chelsea has been hitting the gym again after a season of never seeing a weight on a pitch. It will be good in the long term but the short term is rough.

Last season, Maurizio Sarri said a lot of things that caused a lot of “conversations”. One of the most infamous was when he said his team does not do weight training because he had never seen a weight on a pitch.

Weight training not only makes players stronger and increases endurance, but it also is injury preventative. It is not hard to draw the line from the type of training players were doing and the sheer amount of minutes some were putting in to the injury issues that plagued the Blues at the end of last season. A high work load (lack of rotation and lots of minutes) plus muscles more injury susceptible led to the inevitable.

This season, Lampard has brought back weight training to the joy of many players. But the transition has not been perfect either. For all the long term gains Chelsea will get from using weights again, the short term is going to be a rough adjustment as has already been seen.

Lampard’s style of play is intense. It is much more active and aggressive than anything the Blues have played in recent memory. It requires incredibly fit players above almost anything else. It should have come as little surprise when Chelsea began to fade around the hour mark earlier in the season.

The fitness levels are better now, but the intense preseason followed by the high intensity of training and play since has caused its own issues. N’Golo Kante, Emerson, and Antonio Rudiger have found their own fitness elusive as their injuries seem to pile up one after the other.

Jurgen Klopp and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer faced (or currently face) similar issues with ramping up intensity from a previous manager. Eventually in Klopp’s case, the fitness levels caught up with where they were needed and the injuries virtually went away. So in the short term, weight training and the other added intensity is going to make Chelsea a lot like Liverpool was and Manchester United is currently. The club will be constantly chasing fitness of players.

But in the long term, those injuries will be less and less frequent as the players’ bodies adjust, adapt, and get better suited for the task at hand. Liverpool still has injuries of course, but nothing like they used to have. That is something Lampard can look forward to as his players hit the gym and adapt.

If nothing else, Lampard at least has the academy to call on in the short term and nearly every player called has stepped up. In the long term, the likes of Kante, Emerson, Rudiger and more will come back stronger than ever. Lampard may have slipped by increasing the training intensity so quickly, but it will pay off in the long term at the expense of short term road bumps.