What is different about Mourinho´s relationship with fitness training?

“I'm not a person connected to concepts. However, what I read sometimes makes me reflect on issues that for many people are concepts transformed into absolute truths.

Sorry to those who are believers, but for us (Chelsea staff in 2005) this is simply outdated vocabulary. I am referring to concepts such as physical training, physical preparation, and physical preparation folders, among others.

I do not criticize those who think this way. I am just critical to those who compare our training process with other processes. All training processes and competitions are different. For us it is a matter of design, but more than that is a matter of "operationalization" (putting it into practice).

I start by saying what I have said at other times: I do not have fitness coach, I do not have folders of fitness so as a leader responsible for the process, I would not have folder to give him!

I do have assistants in the training and playing process, with very specific functions, according to the needs of the management of a long season. It all relates to the way we train. We do not have room for physical training, that is, we do not have space for traditional resistance training, strength or speed.

For me it's all a matter of team behavior! We work on our model of play (game model), we work on our principles and sub-principles of play, and we adapt players to ideas that are common to all, in order to establish the same behavioral language.

We work exclusively the game situations that interest me; we are doing the weekly distribution of those situations in accordance with our logic of recovery, training and competition, progressiveness and alternation.

We create habits in order to maintain the good form of the team, which translates into a regular "playing well." I know it's a difficult question to dismount from the cultural point of view. Moreover there are people in their own right, to think radically opposite.

Even for those who say that they are training with situations of small sided games because even these coaches live seized and obsessed with exercise times, rest periods, repetitions, etc. All these questions are for us "accessory".

What is crucial for us is the contents, the game principles inherent in each exercise and the interactive relationship we establish with it. What is really important is to understand that what we seek is the quality of work rather than the quantity, we are simply training to play better.”

José Mourinho, the magazine Record Dez, 15 October 2005

“The value of the information given by the physical tests is similar to the value of a bikini… they will show almost everything but in the end of the day all the “essentials” will be hidden”

Vitor Frade, 1985