Listen to the full interview with Niall Moyna via the podcast.

"It's not a January, February phenomenon. It's a bigger phenomenon than that. The loads and demands we're imposing, particularly on young, developing bodies and even on developed players - because of their amateur status and lack of recovery - is leading to an epidemic of chronic injuries and resulting in players retiring from the game much earlier than they would in previous generations." 

DCU manager and Down coach Niall Moyna feels strongly about the stresses being placed on the bodies of young players and tonight on Off The Ball he told us why things need to change.

Moyna, who is a Profesor in the School of Health and Human Performance at DCU, believes that the packed GAA calendar and county boards "having their heads in the sand" is responsible for the issue, leaving players with virtually no off-season or recovery time.

"The GAA are very good at starting competitions and not very good at getting rid of old ones. Third level gets a pretty rough rap at this time of the year - and some of it is justified - but I've been involved with DCU for 13 years and over the last seven years, we would have no more than 20 per cent of our Sigerson Cup team at Christmas because most club championships don't finish until November. Then you have provincial at both junior, intermediates, senior and U21. It's non-stop all year, year in, year out." 

Moyna explained that recovery time is vitally important for players and based on blood samples taken three years ago, before and after O'Byrne Cup games, the true extent of the problem facing the modern day player was revealed.

"When you undertake strenuous exercise, you damage your muscles and there are certain little proteins in your muscles that leak into the blood. We can measure them in the blood. The average values for that protein in a person should be between 38 and 174. We had two guys in that study who were above 2,000. This is before the game even started. The average before we even started was above the upper limits of normal."

By the time the DCU players had taken part in the second game days later, the levels were still 43 per cent above normal. After the game they were a "whopping" 182 per cent above normal levels, despite no training between the two games. Meanwhile, white blood cell levels had also decreased below normal which puts them at risk of "opportunistic infections" like the flu or a virus.

"That is clear evidence that the players are under enormous stress and are not getting adequate recovery," Moyna concluded, adding that they will carry out further tests on players during this season's O'Byrne Cup.

Indeed the two players who had levels above 2,000 in their blood three years ago, were running the risk of kidney failure.

"There's something called Rhabdomyolysis that can cause death if it's very serious. It happens to troops who march for long periods and two players [were at risk]. If you took the average blood level of the average U21, Sigerson and inter-county, instead of the upper range being about 174, I would expect it to be about 800."

Listen to the full interview via the podcast.

 

Main image by ©INPHO/Lorraine O'Sullivan