Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger in all he does » Exactly how fit is Theo? And why is Koscielny so skinny?

By Phil Gregory

In my match preview for the Blackpool game, I touched upon how Theo looked to have filled out quite a bit and how it’d benefit his game. Now, I didn’t anticipate him quite having the impact that he did, but the results are looking to be extraordinary.

He looked to have a new confidence, and this will certainly be partly due to what looks like a fairly extensive gym workout he’s been on over the summer. Working out has been linked to higher levels of testosterone, which will make him both more aggressive and more competitive, while he’ll feel better in himself and will go out with more belief too. We certainly saw this in his game on Saturday.

Most fans disregarded someone like Koscielny as too skinny after they’ve seen them on the pitch, but such a view doesn’t tell the whole story. All you can really tell is the size of their arms and chest, which is almost totally irrelevant to football (how often do you use your arms in a football game?).

You could argue shoulders are important, but for me the most important muscle group for football is without a doubt the core. I was unsurprised to see in the photos of Arsenal training that the players were doing what looked like Russian Twists, an exercise using a medicine ball that works the obliques, the muscles on the side of your midriff. That’s an absolutely textbook core stability exercise, and exactly what you’d want a football player to be doing.

It doesn’t matter how big a player is if it is the wrong muscles which are big. The best example I can think to illustrate this is at my place of work. I’m a nightclub barman during the university holidays, and on Saturday night we had in some carbon dioxide cylinders for smoke effects or some such.

These cylinders were heavy, made of iron/steel and about two metres tall so I’d guess they weighed around 100-150kgs, and they needed taking up two flights of stairs! A few of the doormen offered to lend a hand, but after doing a couple of the cylinders two of them had knackered their backs carrying the bottom of them which means you’re bearing much of the burden.

I offered to help which they found hilarious, as most of these men are twice or three times my size easily. And yet I could do carry as much as they could, despite them looking significantly stronger. How come? Because they’d been doing a poor workout, which didn’t cover a lot of the major muscle groups in the back and legs. Applying this to football, a much skinnier player wouldn’t have a problem holding off a bigger, stronger player as long as they’d done sufficient work on their core and shoulders.

Back to Theo, and I don’t think it’s possible to overstate just how much an impact his shoulder injuries have had on his game. As someone who’s been nursing a couple of shoulder injuries over the last six months, I can testify to how much it affected my game when I played. You’re constantly aware of the weakness in the joint, which means you won’t jostle for the ball as much and you won’t be as competitive in 50:50s. There’s certainly a psychological element too: you want to go into the game capable of performing to the best of your ability, and you can’t do that with a nagging fitness doubt at the back of your mind.

I was with a top-drawer physio this morning, and when I described my injury the first thing he asked was “have you ever dislocated it?” I hadn’t, which meant rehabilitating the injury would be a quicker and simpler.  My injury wasn’t too severe in the grand scheme of things,  but I’ll still be out of football for a good month at least.. If we look at Theo’s case, the severity of any shoulder injury he had has multiplied significantly because of the fact he’d dislocated it too, as my physiotherapist emphasised. It’s more than likely he had some intrinsic weakness in his joint that required surgery to correct too. All that together, he was out for months at a time, which puts him back to square one in terms of match fitness.

In all, from my own experiences I’m totally unsurprised that we’re only seeing the best of Theo now. Many fans understate the importance of a good pre-season, but conditioning and the like is so, so important in reducing the occurrence of injury later in the season hence why Cesc and Robin have been used sparingly. I do worry about Denilson from a fitness point of view, his regular back and abdominal injuries don’t bode well, and he hasn’t had a pre-season at all.

What’s it like following Arsenal from abroad?  Arsenal Worldwide is launched

New feature : the weekly Untold Ref Index.  How did the ref do in our game?

Do Arsenal really get more injuries than anyone else?

Exclusive: the Untold Arsenal interview with Manchester City’s owner