England players setting gym records thanks to fitness coach Aled Walters

A week before their opening match of the 2019 World Cup against New Zealand, South Africa are training in the midday heat of Kagoshima in southern Japan. Pitchside thermometers are touching 40C while the humidity is so high that it only takes a few steps to be drenched in sweat.

On the pitch, the Springboks are engaged in what several players describe as the most brutal session of their careers. Every player loses at least a couple of kilograms in sweat and several are questioning their life choices, including hooker Schalk Brits who had come out of retirement for the tournament. “At that exact point, I was thinking why did I come back? I wish I had stayed retired,” Brits tells Telegraph Sport. “I think I was curled up in bed, fast asleep by 8pm that night.”

The session pitted a pair of players against each other across four stations: watt bike, breakdown cleaning, tackle bags and then wrestling. That was repeated with minimal rest. “That was one of the toughest things I have ever done,” Tendai ‘Beast’ Mtawarira, the prop, said. “I did not think I was going to survive.”

Barking the orders in his distinctive Welsh accent was head of strength and conditioning Aled Walters who since joined Steve Borthwick with Leicester and now England. Those England supporters in search of a shaft of hope entering the World Cup following an underwhelming series of warm-up games should listen to the Springboks’ experience.

They too engaged in an intensive period of conditioning straight before the tournament under Walters and would lose that opening fixture against the All Blacks. In part that was because Walters’ mandate was to ensure they peaked for the World Cup final, which they duly did beating England 32-12.

“We had eyes on a bigger prize,” Mtawarira said. “We didn’t want to lose or plan to lose to the All Blacks but our preparation was perfect. We left no stone unturned. It was unfortunate that we had a speedbump in that first game, but we were fit as ever, strong as ever and we went on to show it in the tournament. I was in peak shape and breaking records I had set when I was a 20-year-old. I was probably picking up 65kg dumbbells and doing 10 reps. I was doing six reps of 160kg bench press. I was in another space in terms of being strong and fighting fit.”

England players too have been setting all manner of personal records in the gym this summer. Prop Ellis Genge, for example, set new bests of squatting 210kgs and bench pressing 180kg. Everything is tailored around the individual, accounting for age and injury history, but underpinning every programme that Walters designs is the need to produce better rugby players, as England fly-half George Ford explains.

“It is like having another rugby coach to be honest with you,” Ford said. “He was in the gym but other S&C coaches may be purely gym-based but he has his rugby hat on. At the forefront of everything he does is how can you make the individual and the team better at playing rugby rather than scores in the gym. I have never done a session under Aled where I have thought ‘this is mindless’. I have always thought this is well thought out, this is going to make us fitter, it is going to make us better.”

Yet this too might be underplaying Walters’ influence within the group. With South Africa, Leicester and now England, Walters is the single-most important person in setting the atmosphere around the camp. “The S&C role used to be how many lifts to do, how many shuttle runs to do,” Brits said. “Now it has become an integral part to the happiness of the side.

“It was how he managed the players, managing their happiness. In some ways you have to manage the relationship between the players and the coaches and most of the time the S&C coach is the guy in between. He becomes the channel, the pipeline to get to the coach.”

This is Walters’ real genius and his particular value to Borthwick, whose dry seriousness is counterbalanced by Walters’ humorous wackiness. “Steve is not the most outgoing or extrovert of individuals, but Aled is the yin to his yang. Aled just brought a relaxed vibe to the atmosphere,” Freddie Burns, the former Leicester fly-half, said. “He would heckle Steve in his team meetings. When Steve is delivering quite a straight message to have Aled come in and break that intensity and allow to take a breath was really important. He was also very happy to say the most awkward thing possible in a team meeting and would just bask in that silence.”

A zany sense of humour may seem tangential to being a successful strength and conditioning coach but this is what pulled the Springboks through that dark day in Kagoshima.

“That sense of humour made you forget about the pain,” Mtawarira said. “It definitely worked in his favour. Some of those sessions were very strenuous and tough and you need something to make you forget about what you are going through. He did it so well, finding the perfect balance making fun of someone like Bongi and brought a lot of enjoyment to the fitness and gym sessions.

“Aled played a massive role in getting the Springbok team to become the best in the world and ultimately world champions. For me he played a key role in getting me to the World Cup and getting my conditioning to the level it needed to be. I don’t know if I would have got there without him.”