Wales scrum-half Gareth Davies has opened up on the 'challenging' training session that saw Wales players have hoods put over their heads, saying the team has bonded as a result.
Wales coach Warren Gatland revealed earlier this week that he has sought to test his players 'psychologically' with some unorthodox methods.
As their World Cup preparations ramps up, the squad recently spent a morning at The Green Mile army-style fitness camp in Taffs Well, taking on a series of physical and mental challenges. You can read details on what they did here.
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Dragons hooker Elliot Dee had already described the surprise off-site trip as a "highlight", with Scarlets scrum-half Davies now elaborating more on what players were put through.
"It was a good day," said Davies. "We really enjoyed getting off site.
"We didn't really know what we were in for to be honest before we got there. It was a tough couple of hours physically - running up a steep hill with a log and jumping in a pool trying to do a lap under the pool without breathing.
"There was a lot of breathing work - trying to recover quicker and stuff like that. We did that for a couple of hours with some power endurance and some wrestling and some circuits and stuff like that.
"That was the first block and then we had a mental challenge where they put us in some stressful positions. We weren't allowed to talk for an hour. They put a bag over our head so we couldn't see where we were and they moved us around the camp.
"There were some weird stressful noises in the background. It was good, quite challenging. We knew it was going to be around the hour mark but it felt like we were there for three or four hours.
"We felt really good after it. We bonded well as a team and got some good positives from it."
As well as praising the bonding experience, Davies believes the different methods were useful for the players.
"Yes. It's something different, isn't it?" He said. "We'd had a tough week leading up to that.
"We'd done a lot of running the previous day. To do something different like that was good for us mentally. We really enjoyed it. It was tough but we came out of it feeling good.
He added: "It's different. Every training session is mentally hard, especially when you're doing tough conditioning sessions.
"To be in a different environment - we didn't have the coaches there - we had some ex-marines taking us. We had to respond differently to them.
"It was a little bit different mentally. We had hoods over our heads in an awkward position with our arms up in the air for a couple of minutes.
"I know it doesn't sound very hard but after a few hours of running up hills with logs when you're in that stressful position with a hood over your head it was quite challenging."
