JAMES HASKELL

People make very many comments in life when they don't have the background or the knowledge.

I like my boxing and jiu jitsu and that kind of stuff and one thing I always enjoyed from an early age was shooting. My godfather got me into it. It started with airguns and shotguns and that kind of stuff.

I've always been confident in my rugby ability but with England I had to adjust my behaviour.

I was consuming the most food when I came to Wasps. I was eating six meals a day - 250-300g of protein, 300g of carbs, 250g of veg, six times every day. It was extensive, horrific. And tedious.

I was diagnosed with ADD when I was 14. Weirdly enough, I then learnt, through doing different things, to concentrate.

To stay at the elite end of professional sport you need to show an awful lot of dedication.

I've learned that, bizarrely, I enjoy having a fight. Obviously nobody likes getting hit, but I don't have a problem with it. In MMA you've got to take a few hits to reach the right position.

As a player you have to look after your body because no one else will. I'd rather be proactive than kowtow to everyone and be injured all the time.

Going to a final and winning is the best thing in life, and it makes rugby no longer a job. It makes it fun.

In reality, rugby is finite and unpredictable, so players need to have skills off the pitch too.

As soon as you're put on a pedestal, you're easily knocked off it.

I like to think I am honest and open.

Do I respect my competition? Yeah. Do I always think that I could do a better job? Of course.

I love deejaying and got the opportunity to do a music production course online and loved it, but I am about as musically talented as a house brick.

If you want to build a larger physique that actually makes you look like you lift, you need to train your shoulders, back, triceps, glutes, and legs more frequently. You probably also need to suck it up and train them harder than you ever have before if you want them to grow.

If no one ever made a mistake we'd never get anywhere. One side would keep the ball until half-time and the other team would do the same for the whole of the second half.

When I was about 15, I learnt that training hard doesn't get easier, you just learn to push harder. That's a powerful mentality to master.

There is nowhere to hide as an international back-row forward.

I don't think my parents imagined I'd represent England when they first drove me to mini-rugby at Maidenhead. I was only five but mum lied about my age to get me out of the house.

It doesn't matter if you've got the best team in the world, you can't play rugby on your own try-line.

My first memory is being taken for Indian food at the Cookham Tandoori on the High Street - I remember the poppadoms, the onions, the chicken tikka.

At most grounds you're not particularly conscious of the crowd but in Cardiff, with the roof closed against a good Welsh team, the noise is impossible to ignore. It can be loud enough to put you off your game and the Welsh undoubtedly possess some of the most passionate fans in the world.

When you have two-thirds of possession in any match you have got to turn that pressure into points.

I want to do presenting, I love DJing, I love writing but none of it's a guaranteed job so it's still very scary.

The bottom line is that players have to be responsible for getting themselves in the right frame of mind.