Don't trust your eyes when it comes fitness and strength

I had the tremendous honour in 2008, 2010 and 2011 of training the International Rules teams.

One of my objectives with the team was to make them incredibly aerobically fit. To achieve this, I designed my own aerobic fitness test called the M+M test. The test was a combination of hard running that consisted of accelerations, decelerations and turning.

The test was run over 240 metres in the shape of a massive 'M'. The idea was to mimic what the footballers would have to do in the match. I was also training some Premier League football players at the time, so this was also useful in testing their heart and lungs fitness.

After completing numerous tests on the Irish Gaelic football amateurs and the highly paid soccer professionals, one player kept standing out with his amazing aerobic output.

The player in question was a full-time plumber who played Gaelic football at the highest level. He trained four to five nights a week as well as working 40-50 hours.

The twist to this story was the player also had the highest body fat in all the players tested. His body fat percentage using the Harpenden Calliper method was 17.4%. Normally I like my professional football players to operate in and around the 6-8% body fat range and my amateur Gaelic footballers slightly higher preferably 7-9.5%.

So amazingly when I drilled down a bit more with this aerobically impressive Gaelic footballer, I established his nutrition needed a lot of tweaking.

He would eat bacon and sausage sandwiches whilst working out on site, numerous cups of tea with biscuits during the day, a fully cooked dinner followed by one and sometimes two bowls of Coco Pops for supper.

The adage of 'you can't outtrain a bad diet’ was never so true as in this case. I nicknamed the