Tottenham Hotspur's Jermain Defoe.

The Spurs striker talks through his punishing training regime last autumn.

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“I just love playing football. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than stepping out in front of thousands of people and scoring goals.

“I know how important maintaining my fitness is to me being able to continue to do what I love for many years to come, so I take my training very seriously.

“I don’t drink alcohol, always make sure I eat healthy food and, last summer, I went that extra mile to make sure I was fitter than ever ahead of the current campaign.

“I sustained a bad injury towards the start of last season and it affected my fitness. So I cut my summer holidays short by two weeks to travel to France and work with a fitness coach named Tiberius Darau.

“He’s around 70 years old and he’s got some great ideas – I think he’s a genius to be honest. As he was a forward like me in his playing days, he knows what is needed. So all the drills I did were short, sharp and explosive. I was doing two hour sessions in the gym, and I was doing two sessions in a day.

“I would start training in the morning at about half seven, take the afternoon off and then go back into the gym at five o’clock for a couple of hours and work really hard. I would do a lot of lower body work for the power to be explosive, and the results have been great.

“But it was hard – really hard. I’ve never worked like that in my life. There were times when I wanted to cut it short and just go back home, but I thought that if you put the work in, you get rewarded for it. So I did it and I’m happy that I did it.

“I pushed myself to the limit and, when I did that, I knew that I was going to have a good season.”