Vizoco explains thinking behind Roma's pre-season fitness programme

Vizoco, in charge of the club’s fitness work, says he reiterates the same mantra to his players as they put in the hard yards during pre-season: the pain they feel now will be rewarded when they need to dig deep at the business end of the season..

A long-time collaborator of coach Eusebio Di Francesco, Vizoco feels good about the work the club has been doing this summer, to get the players ready for the challenges of another long campaign.

“The coach is always in charge of our work: we work with him to build up the players towards our common goal,” Vizoco told asroma.com.

“Everyone works on their areas of expertise, but if the coach does not like a particular programme then we change it. He is in control, of every decision that we make.”

Reflecting on training so far, Vizoco added: “From a logistical perspective, being at Trigoria [to start pre-season] allowed us to improve the level of work. Pinzolo [last year] was very good, but you cannot find every resource that we have at home to optimise the training programme.

"In Rome we have everything available, from the pitch to the kitchen. At Trigoria we are able to do basically everything to improve the fitness, as we learned last season

“In terms of preparation, we have had almost the entire squad available to us from the first day – and that is a massive advantage. Last season we started out with a depleted group, and then others joined us for the games in the United States: the volume of work we could do was limited.

"This year, instead, we started work with a basically full squad. The differences have proven to be significant and we think it will bring a lot of different advantages.”

Coming into his second full season with the Giallorossi, the players have the advantage of already understanding what the coaches want from them - and Vizoco has the advantage of already knowing the various needs and tendencies of the first-team squad.

He said: “This year we definitely have an advantage, knowing the squad a bit better, which is a not insignificant aide for our work: we’re not starting from zero in terms of our understanding of their fitness – and we can continue building on what we started last season.

"The fruits of our work will be seen over the course of the campaign, but the response of the guys in these first few weeks has been very positive.

“We continue to be very pleased with the condition of the guys. The first two weeks in Trigoria were a good base. At San Diego we had the right weather conditions to work hard without too many concerns. The same goes for Boston, which we already knew well. We have continued to work very well after the good start in Rome.”

Is it hard to motivate players, to put in the work when they would rather have the ball at their feet?

“Certainly, the guys enjoy it more when they are working with the ball!” Vizoco joked. “But what I would like to underline is the real willingness to sacrifice that I have seen from the players: I’ve seen an improvement in their understanding of the value of the work we do, work without the ball. This is undoubtedly a huge thing for us.

“Inside the gym in San Diego we would say: ‘The suffering I do today will reward me tomorrow, if I don’t want to suffer today I won’t enjoy the benefits tomorrow’. This is the aim: understanding that what we do today will really help us in the future to reach our goals. The guys all seem to buy into this too.”

With the season now about to get underway, the general training programme will not really change.

“We will try to continue the programme we have,” Vizoco said. “We have laid the foundations during pre-season, which will always be built upon.

“You cannot think that this sort of work finishes at the end of the pre-season, and then that playing itself will be enough for the players to maintain fitness. Obviously the workloads and exercises will be different, and it will become more important to balance the recovery amid the rhythm of all the games.”