HELLO and welcome to my first article in the Gazette.

I'd like to thank you for taking the time to read this and hope you enjoy my other subjects of health, fitness and rehabilitation over the coming weeks.

In my first article, I'm going to talk about my recent trip to Italy, to further my knowledge on injury rehabilitation and development.

My trip was thanks to a fantastic coach, Francesco Dimundo.

I met Francesco through a professional network and discovered we had a lot of similar theories and goals in what we wanted to bring to our respective areas of study.

I went out to develop my strength and conditioning skills and learn from my time working in English professional football and learn the comparisons.

Francesco has worked with teams such as Hibs in Scotland, FC Bari 1906 and is now working with SS Monopoli 1966 in the south-east of Italy.

He also works with two elite volleyball teams (Italy’s second biggest sport after football).

He has a great perspective of all types of conditioning and exposure to different environments and fields.

We worked through sessions and theories on several different training protocols, including specific agility, power, speed, change of direction drills and repeated sprint training.

We also worked on proprioceptive and eccentric overloading (which I will go into more details about in my next set of articles).

During my time there, I also got the chance to meet and chat with Andrea Azzalin.

Andrea was the Premier League-winning strength and conditioning coach at Leicester City for the 2015/16 season and stayed there until Claudio Ranieri was dismissed earlier this year.

He has previously worked at AS Monaco and the Greek national football team.

During his time at Leicester, they had an injury rate of 2.43 overuse injuries for every 1,000 contact hours - an incredibly low rate for such injuries.

I was fortunate enough to be asked to speak on an Italian Master degree about English football and the rehabilitation and conditioning techniques we used over here.

The trip to Italy was a fantastic learning experience and exposure to professional football in Europe.

I can’t talk highly enough of the work that Francesco does with his players and being able to have a week of exposure to high-level coaches like him and Andrea really help to enhance rehab and conditioning skills.