By Joe Ellis

6th Jul, 2022 | 7:10am

West Ham United coach Josh Ewens hails 'unbelievable' St Andrews

West Ham United recently completed a training camp at the St Andrews campus facility in Scotland before flying off to France for further training.

David Moyes and his senior squad are currently in Evian, France where they are going through a warm-weather training camp after beginning their pre-season preparations in Scotland.

Irons fitness coach, Josh Ewens, led the workload without the football at St Andrews and spoke to The Athletic about the whole experience and his unusual methods to finding success.

“We’re having three sessions a day,” Ewens said. “It’s been tiring but great and the facilities at St Andrews are unbelievable. There’s everything you could want from the famous West Sands beach, the pool and performance gym.

“We try and mix up the schedule to keep things fresh. We tend to start at either 7am or 8am and it would be something short and simple. Most likely a run on the beach and it’s a nice way to start the day, especially for the lads that aren’t early risers. We’ve been getting the lads on mountain bikes and taking them on challenging bike rides.

“We have a main session later in the morning which is mainly football. There’s physical elements like biometric and speed work, a bit of power walk too.

“Then the third session is a variety of things: some days it’s another football session with a different physical emphasis, or a running conditioning session followed by gym work. The gaffer is constantly pushing everyone in the fitness and performance department to develop what we’re doing.”

One month

Ewens and fellow West Ham fitness coach Nick Davies need to keep on with their plans because the Premier League season kicks off in just one month against the reigning champions Manchester City.

It won’t be until then that we will find out if mountain biking is actually the key to a successful pre-season but we can count ourselves lucky that no injuries have been sustained during that exercise – at least that we know of.

We’ve got a packed schedule of friendly games thankfully lined up before Pep Guardiola brings his City side to the London Stadium for the opening game of the 2022-23 season and we need to be at our sharpest to have a chance against the Citizens.

West Ham Under-23 players have also been getting the treatment from Ewens and Davies which could suggest that the Scot is more likely to call upon our homegrown talent this season which would be a blessed relief.