McHugh: 'Michael Hegarty was one of the strongest - from being a sheep-farmer'

Martin McHugh has questioned why the modern Gaelic footballer needs to spend so much time in the gym and not enough time on the field.

McHugh insisted players who did manual work were every bit as powerful and even more skillful, giving the example of his Kilcar clubman Michael Hegarty, who was one of the most gifted players ever to wear the Donegal jersey. Hegarty last year lined out for his club for a 26th successive season, aged 42.

"Michael Hegarty who played with Donegal is one of the strongest players I've seen playing,” McHugh said in Towney at the launch of the Allianz League. “I was lucky enough to play a bit with him but he never did any gym work. He got it from being a sheep-farmer and doing manual work.

Michael Hegarty helped Donegal to the 2011 Ulster SFC crown

"Martin Gavigan was another player I played with and he was very, very physically strong and he was a rower. When I took over Cavan, Bernard Morris was a pig-farmer, he was naturally strong and in my opinion, lads like them are stronger than the modern day player who is doing weights all the time and no manual work.

“It has changed completely that way. They're spending more time in the gym and doing meetings and analysing different teams but we spent more time on the field with a ball."

McHugh, the 1992 Footballer of the Year who helped Donegal to win Sam Maguire that same year, believes some of the fundamentals are being lost in the sport, giving an example of the time spent training without the football.

"Well when I played, I kicked 100 balls a day, that's what I did,” he said. “Every single day. I made sure I kicked 100 balls every day. At the end of every session, I said I was four points down and I had to kick five points in a row. Now that could take me an hour to do that and I used to do it from different angles.

"That was the way I trained and prepared and most of my team-mates did that too. So we went to the football field to train and now, there's a lot of training done in the gym.”