Prepare for a game like Gini: The next-day recovery
It's the morning after a game, players' limbs are tired and aching from their exertions the day before. So just what exactly are they doing to recover ahead of beginning work on the next match?
“The day after a game, I obviously feel really tired…”
If you’ve played a lot of minutes in the game, then you don’t train; instead you will do a morning recovery session, which involves some running and stretching. After that, I will go home and I don’t try to sleep immediately because I will otherwise have problems trying to fall asleep in the night, so I try to stay up until early evening and then go to bed and sleep for a lot of hours in a row! Sometimes you’re dead tired when you go home, so you just want to sleep for one or two hours, so when I feel like that, I’ll set an alarm and have a rest.
“I think I’m naturally a really fit person...”
I can go all of the time during the games, but I also get tired. For me, the games with Manchester City and Arsenal were the most intense games and I was really tired after them. But again, Mona helped me a lot with it. As I said, I am not a person who is hungry all the time, so I didn’t used to eat a lot in a day. But when I was speaking with Mona earlier this year, she asked me how I ate and I explained to her that sometimes I would eat in the morning and then be full until the evening and not feel hungry in the afternoon, so I didn’t have lunch. But Mona made me aware that even if you’re not really hungry, you still have to feed your body with energy and those kinds of things. What she explained is that you don’t need to eat a lot. For example, if you eat yoghurt with muesli or that kind of thing, it can help you go forward because if you don’t have energy in your body, you’ll obviously be tired. Now what I try to do is eat breakfast, lunch and dinner because my body needs it. If you play at an intense level, you lose a lot of energy, so you need to fill it up again with food, drinks and shakes. Mona has helped me with it and I am aware now it’s really important.
“I’ll be honest, my cooking skills aren’t great…”
...so I will take the food Mona has made home with me, or when my family come over they will cook for me. I can’t cook – it’s a shame! My grandma wanted me to cook when I was young all the time, but I was too lazy to do it!