Next month will bring a pre-season like no other at Tottenham Hotspur. The Spurs players have never experienced a pre-season training camp quite like the one Antonio Conte and his fitness coaches Costantino Coratti, Gian Piero Ventrone and Stefano Bruno have planned for them.
Some of the longer-serving Tottenham squad members will have undergone the gruelling summers under Mauricio Pochettino as the Argentine looked to make them fit enough to carry out his energy-sapping pressing tactics. Yet Conte's pre-season schedule is said to require a whole new level of pushing their bodies to the limit.
For a little insight into how the very top players who have played for the Italian remember his summer training sessions, you only have to watch the first episode of Amazon's All or Nothing series documenting Juventus' season under Andrea Pirlo.
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During Pirlo's first pre-season as a Serie A coach, the young Juve boss is dealing with tired, complaining players on the pitches at the training ground and as they walk off after the session, one of his coaches says to him: "Anyway, players are always complaining."
Pirlo responds: "Sure. I don't give a crap that they complain. If they saw what we did with Conte, they'd kill themselves. [There were] people on the ground."
High-intensity drills, with extreme fitness work done in a concentrated amount of time, are understood to be the foundation of Conte's fitness philosophy. The 52-year-old Italian and his staff have already transformed the players' fitness within seven months of working around matches.
Harry Kane has stated that he is fitter than he ever has been in his career and even fringe players like Joe Rodon have thanked the Italian and his coaches for what they have done for him as he plays for Wales after a season with only 10 appearances to his name for Spurs.
"The gaffer at Tottenham he works us all very hard. I can only thank the staff and him of course for what they have been like with me over the course of the season," the defender told Sky Sports this week.
"They have kept us, even the ones who don't play, in very good condition and I think it's a credit to his team and of course the boys have put in the work as well. It benefits us of course and the intensity we train at is very high and I can only be thankful for the condition he's kept me in."
If that was from fitness work during a season, with an acknowledgement that the players must not be burned out because they need to be fresh enough for matches in between, just imagine what pre-season, without those competitive distractions, will be like.
Gary Cahill said of his first Chelsea pre-season under Conte: "Pre-season is always hard but this was one of the hardest I have experienced in the last few years – definitely in terms of fitness. We did a lot of running and intensive endurance work. I feel it has been only good for the body and got us in the condition you have to be in to play in the Premier League."
At Tottenham, those players involved in international games this month are expected to be handed three weeks off to return in time for the club's flight to Korea on July 9, while the non-internationals will return to Hotspur Way at the beginning of that week.
New signings at Tottenham often arrive late in the window but Conte wants the club to dispense with that policy on the whole and get a batch of the newcomers in far earlier so they can take part in a pre-season that will define how they deal with his requirements over the course of the season.
It's telling that the first new face through the door is someone who knows the head coach's methods well - Ivan Perisic. The Croatian was one of the hardest workers in Conte's title-winning season at Inter Milan and keeps himself in the utmost physical condition. Watching the 33-year-old handle the physical demands of a Conte pre-season will set the tone for the others.
The players are preparing themselves for the gruelling month. A decision was made to pull Ryan Sessegnon out of England U21 duty this week after his busy end to the season to ensure he could rest up fully and ensure his hamstring problems are a thing of the past because Conte's sessions next month could either make him or break him.
What will be fascinating in July is how Conte manages Tottenham's pre-season commitments across the globe around the crucial training sessions. Not long after pre-season starts and the international players return, Spurs swiftly head off to play two matches in Korea, against Team K League – a selection of the best players from Korea’s professional league - and Sevilla.
Then they will return home and a week later travel to Glasgow to face Rangers in a friendly on July 23 before finishing their pre-season campaign in Israel with a match against Jose Mourinho's Roma on July 30.
As with many managers, Conte has not always been the biggest fan of travelling abroad the world during pre-season. Pochettino once admitted that he would rather stay at the training ground for the entire month rather than head off across the world fulfilling money-spinning tours and Conte appears to be of a similar mindset.
After a difficult start to the 2017/18 season at Chelsea, Conte looked back at the summer as a factor.
"I think we have to face the reality and try to do our best," Conte said. "If I stay here to complain it is not the right way. For sure it is difficult because to face a game every three days is not simple, especially if your squad is not big, but at the same time we have to face this situation. For sure some players can be tired, that’s normal because some players are playing from this summer and our tours in China and Singapore."
Conte is not someone who hides his feelings particularly well and he will quickly make his opinion known if this summer matches interfere with his best-laid plans. He will have plenty of time though to hatch those plans and in the summer heat of Korea much of his preparatory work will be done with the players on the training pitches in Seoul. After that, the trips to Scotland and Israel will be quicker affairs, allowing plenty of days on the pitches of Hotspur Way.
It is a shorter pre-season due to the earlier start to the Premier League campaign, thanks to that winter World Cup. That means Conte and his coaches will push the squad even harder in a more concentrated period of time.
Antonio Conte is building a new Tottenham Hotspur and the players are certainly going to feel it this summer.
