Rennie Explains Work Behind Protecting Players’ Physical & Mental Wellbeing

- Leicester City’s Head Physiotherapist, Dave Rennie, speaks to LCFC TV about the Football Club’s efforts to stay engaged with its players
- Rennie discusses the methods Club staff are using to maintain the Foxes’ mental and physical wellbeing
- City’s players are currently following the Government’s stay-at-home guidelines during the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic

During an unprecedented period in which Premier League action has come to a halt as the world continues to respond to the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic, new challenges have arisen for many, including those working within the football industry.

Rennie, who has worked for the Foxes for over two decades, joined LCFC TV presenter Dan Bates on a video call earlier this week to explain how the Football Club are delivering fitness programmes to their players.

“They are unbelievable times and it’s not something we’ve really ever thought [about] and we’ve not had a strategy in place so there’s been a lot of very flexible thinking on behalf of the group,” Rennie said.

“I’m quite lucky in that I work with some unbelievably talented individuals like within our Sports Science Team, so Matt Reeves and Tom Joel, along with Glen Driscoll.

“They have formulated the strategy and Matt Horton as well has really implemented a number of programmes, so all of our players are following significant home programmes, in terms of their fitness and their strength and conditioning, with the Strength and Conditioning Team of Mitch Willis and Pete Habershon really running that side of things for them.

“The players themselves have taken to it, it’s quite novel at the moment. How long that lasts for, obviously, it needs a lot of flexibility in the system to be able to make sure that we can keep achieving the standards that we have done so far.

“But it’s been a nice challenge for us, something a bit different which also gives you a little bit of energy and a new bit of zest to it, so all things considered, they’ve done quite well in the sense of the programming so far.”

Club staff have been in regular contact with City’s players over the past few weeks to ensure that not only their physical health, but their mental wellbeing, is maintained during a spell of significant time away from others.

He said: “There’s a strap line at the moment isn’t there - ‘putting the social back into social media’ - and that’s probably a really big thing for us. We’re quite a tight club anyway and our relationships with our players have always stood us in really good stead.

“So, it is very easy for us to pick up the phone or to text them or to stay in contact that way, so in terms of the programming sides of the things for the fitness side of things, they receive messages on a special messenger app that we have, called the SAP system, which allows us to provide them with their daily programmes that they need to be getting on with.

“But equally, what we try and do is to maintain as much face-to-face contact as we can through video messaging or even just simple text messages, just to make sure that they’re okay and not just particularly themselves, but also their families.

“The mental side of things is really interesting and it’s an area that over the next few years certainly within professional male sport, it’s going to be a really apparent area that we have to focus on.

“We’ve spent quite a lot of time with our players over the last six months, discussing how we can tackle issues in and around mental health for them and this has really just highlighted, when you have a massive change in your working environment, how that can have a knock-on effect to your mental health.

“All of our players have been given specific advice in regards to maintaining theirs and their partners’ and families’ mental health. As we know all of us that are now sitting in isolation, it’s quite testing when you’re with someone 24 hours a day.

“We do a lot of stuff with them in terms of trying to create a structure to their day, trying to get them to train at the normal times that they would normally train at to try and maintain their body clocks so that they don’t drift.”

Rennie says implementing a regular, daily routine, through his own experiences as a father, has a significant effect on a player’s productivity while they remain at home.

“As someone who has adolescent children, the ability of them to sleep through the entire morning and not actually surface until mid-afternoon is an issue that I try and deal with as a father, so it’s important for our players that they have that kind of structure and a routine to their day,” he explained.

“We’ve also spoken to them about the amount of social media that’s out there at the moment and media… every time you turn the TV on there’s an awful lot of information that you can receive on any given day and sometimes, if you’re not in the right mental space, that can be quite taxing for you and it can be quite stressful and quite anxiety-producing.

“It’s okay to turn your phone off, it’s okay not to engage with that type of media content, because it can be, as we say, very anxiety-provoking, but some of the biggest things are some of the basic things, like we talk there about putting the social back into social media. 

“It is a really great opportunity for us to connect with our family and our friends, albeit from a distance, and that’s really, really important for us in terms of the Government messages, but what we’ve found is that the players are finding different ways to challenge their families and to have those re-established communication pathways that maybe sometimes get put to the background when everyone’s rushing off to work and everyone’s running around trying to do things.”

Many of the Football Club’s first team stars have used their social media following to encourage others to stay fit and challenge their skillsets, whether that be Jamie Vardy asking journalists to do the worm or Christian Fuchs deadlifting his wife and son on a sun lounger.

“I’m sure as the media world have seen, players are coming up with their own ways with the toilet roll challenge and different things along those lines to try and keep themselves entertained, but we’ve also got other players that I’m working with who have taken the opportunity to take on new skills,” said Rennie.

“We’ve got people who are doing singing coaching from online platforms, they’re learning musical instruments that they’ve never played before.

“We've got other players learning guitars and things like that, so they are trying to make the best of the additional time that they have in a way of engaging with themselves mentally, as much as physically, to try and stay attuned to where they need to be.

“Mental health for us is a huge topic, it’s one that I think isn’t spoken openly enough about and still has a lot of stigma involved with it, but it’s something that we all have to deal with and we need to try and be together in order to be able to do that, which is difficult at this time, so it’s using the other mediums of social contact that we can do to try and promote those messages to stay challenged and to stay secure as a group.”

An additional challenge that Rennie and his staff must navigate is ensuring injured players remain on course to successfully complete their rehabilitation programmes despite having no face-to-face contact with the Club’s medical team.

He continued: “I’m really fortunate as a head of the department, it makes my life much, much easier when I work with a group of people who are forward-thinking and who embrace change.

“Simon Murphy and Gary Silk, the other two physios that work with me at a first team level and then all of our physios who work all the way through the Academy are very, very flexible in the way that they work and so they’ve adapted the way that they interact with the players.

“There’s a lot of video messaging going on from any of the injured players that we’re dealing with. [We’ve got] a lot of reinforcing of programming all from a distance.

“We have to go along with the Government messages as well and physio is difficult because physio is a hands-on practice, which is quite difficult when you’re at the other end of a phone, but, through having good relationships and a trust in those relationships, we can cope with that, because the message is still there and we can still have the face-to-face contact.” 

Earlier this week, LCFC TV spoke with Portugal international right-back Ricardo Pereira, who is currently recovering from an ACL injury that he unknowingly picked up against Aston Villa last month.

“From the video-related side of the things, on our first team side, for example, we’ve only really got a couple of players both who are long-term injured, so they are on-going with programmes, but they understand the limits that we can place on that,” Rennie said.

“But because we’ve got the relationships with them and the communication pathways are still open, we can still do it. It just means that we don’t get to put our hands onto their legs whilst we’re doing it, if you like. But, yes, it’s been taxing, it’s been difficult.

“It’s also given us an opportunity to do different things that we haven’t done in terms of the way we communicate, but also in terms of our planning. So, because we have a little bit more time to ourselves now in the afternoons, when we’re not interacting with the players, we can evaluate where we’ve been as a department and how we’ve addressed a number of the issues in terms of injury risks and management this year.”

“Probably whereabouts we are at the moment in terms of that and whether we’re happy with that and it’s allowing us really to start to plan for what will be the rest of this season but also really move forward to thinking about what’s it going to be like next year when we move into our new training facility and what sort of hurdles are we going to have to overcome there in terms of communication and the pathways in terms of injury management at the Club.

“It’s given us an opportunity to take stock of where we are and where we’d like to be as well.”

Having previously worked at the Leicester Royal Infirmary, Rennie concluded the interview by underlining the role everyone must play to ensure the NHS and its staff have the best chance to successfully tackle the COVID-19 pandemic and ultimately save lives.

He said: "I really can’t stress how important it is for everybody to follow these guidelines and the guidance that the Government are giving us, I don’t envy the position that they’re in to try and formulate this into a package that is acceptable to the general public as a whole, but as someone who has worked in the NHS myself, I know how hard it can be at the best of times working in that environment.

“I can only begin to imagine how stressful and anxious those people are going to be working in that environment. When you’re working on the front line in any industry and you’re face-to-face with a family or a patient and you don’t have the relative equipment or you don’t have the answers even, it becomes really, really difficult.

“We’ve had a lot of conversations between our staff and our players as such and we know that as a football club, Leicester City, we’re an organisation if you like, but we’re part of the bigger community in terms of Leicestershire and we know that we need to try and support the NHS staff within Leicestershire as best as we can.

“We’re trying to formulate ways we can do that, but certainly the NHS staff who are currently working in the University Hospitals of Leicestershire, the Leicestershire Partnerships Trust and all of the teams that are working really in the community, in GP practices and occupational therapists, speech and language therapists, all the people that are still working to keep the NHS going, it’s really important that we support them.

“It’s also important to know, even the private healthcare system within Leicestershire has changed as well and that needs our support now as well. The Spire Hospital in Leicester, that’s based in Oadby and Nuffield over in Scraptoft, they’ve both been commandeered to come in and support the NHS services.

“As well as the main hospitals in Leicester, the NHS ones, they’re also being supplemented by the private health system and it’s really, really important. We need to address the whole of this thing as a collective.

“We really, really need to get through this and we will get through this, but we have to do it collectively and we’ve got to do it responsibly and by being responsible we have to really follow the Government’s guidance as best we can.

“We need to give the people working in the NHS support, but we’ve got to give them a chance and the only way we can really give them a chance is to really follow the guidelines, so stay at home, protect the NHS and that will save lives.

"My advice really would be to try as best you can to stay at home and stay safe.”