How best to get the Boks battle-ready

Super rugby has begun, and with it a 10-month journey to Twickenham and World Cup glory.

The team that lifts the Webb Ellis Cup may be the one that gets its best players on the field when it matters, and that may mean keeping them off it when it doesn't.

After the Springboks won the 2007 Rugby World Cup, much was made of the strategy used to rest the players to ensure that we got to the final with a fully healthy team, all first-choice players available.

That's certainly part of the formula for success, though New Zealand won the 2011 tournament despite some key injuries, proving it is not an absolute necessity if there is sufficient depth.

Whether or not South Africa has that depth is debatable. The past two seasons suggest not, which is why the strategy to manage key players over the next six months is so vital.

In a positive step, last week SA Rugby and the Super rugby franchises agreed to manage key players' game-time individually, and that no player would play for more than five consecutive weeks.

This represents a good compromise, but is probably not optimal. Physiologically speaking, the ideal strategy is not intermittent weeks off, but rather a big block off.

Usain Bolt, for instance, does not race for 10 months of the year, even if he can rest every fourth week. He trains to target a three-month period of best performance.

Rugby does not, however, allow an athletic-type calendar, and creative solutions must be found. One example, used by the All Blacks in 2007, became one of the main points of controversy raised in their World Cup "postmortem", and understanding it is an interesting and useful lesson in high-performance management.

The practical problem facing all teams is this: the ideal time to condition players for a six-week long World Cup at the end of a long, challenging season is July, August and September.

That coincides with the international season, and is the reason these sub-optimal adjustments are made. In 2007, South Africa rested key players in this window anyway, something New Zealand officials felt their public and board would not tolerate.

Instead, the All Blacks moved that conditioning block to the first three months of the year, and 24 players were withdrawn from their Super rugby teams for the competition's first seven rounds.

Then began intense off-field training, and the results were impressive - almost every player improved their speed by 2% (a big gain), saw big gains in fatigue resistance, achieved 17% improvements in lower body and 10% in upper body power.

Impressive numbers, and the coaching staff would have been salivating at the prospects of those players carrying these never-seen-before abilities into competition.

Then it came a little unstuck.

According to the report, the big issue was that the players re-entered Super rugby in week eight, and their Super rugby coaches threw them right into the battle. However, the players had not had much field time. They were not contact-ready, had done little ball-skill work, and basically came into a high-speed contest off a complete off-season.

In the report's words, "the conditioning programme underestimated the dent in confidence that some players experienced from not having played . There is no substitute for opposition given that match fitness, skill execution and decision-making are critical components of winning rugby teams".

That's why the All Blacks abandoned this strategy in 2011, and will not repeat it this year either. They will apply a similar policy to South Africa, with players rested for two Super rugby matches this season.

Simply resting players - a call you're bound to hear in the next six months - is not the answer. Nor is playing them every week. One week off every five? I'd prefer to see one in three, but when players are owned by two bosses, the compromise is acceptable.

Let's hope it is effective.