Dan O'Brien Quotes

When I was younger, I could carry 270 around and run go routes, and it was no big deal.

In the game of football, you need to be strong, and at my position, you need to be able to put up a good fight. So I work on my upper body and lower body strength because your body's got to be able to last.

I love doing a lot of cardio. It's not so much for the way I look. It's for how I perform. If I get in the ring with a 215-pounder, I wanna be able to keep up with him agility-wise. I take that back to my football days of being a large athlete that could move.

A weightlifter should be able to do everything and borrow things from other sports to beat competitors.

I'm not privy to the English set-up, but at the academies in Ireland, there is a huge focus on the weights room as opposed to whether they can throw a 10-metre pass on the run. They should be rugby players becoming athletes, not athletes becoming rugby players.

All physical activity begins with the body's core. I maintain the strength in my core so that I can jump, run, start, stop, and accelerate at the highest levels.

You must be fast enough - you must have endurance. So you run fast for speed and repeat it many times for endurance.

Boxing combines, in perfect proportion, strength, speed, and endurance. Normally, most sports are either about one of the three: either about speed or endurance or strength. Boxing combines all three of them. It's really intense.

If I am running 100 yards, I should be cut. Because then I am getting beat. I do not need to be doing that. I need to be running 20, 30, 40 yards as fast as I can over and over and over at optimal energy and efficiency and speed.

In Sevens, fitness is crucial, and it's going to come down to how quickly my body gets in shape.

When I was competing, I would run daily 20 kilometers, and in addition to that, I'd put in many hours of fighting and sparring. That's why I was always able to keep the speed in the ring. I would train so hard that sometimes it was not only hard to stand up, but it would also be hard to lay down.

Overall strength work - if you can do it regularly - makes a massive difference on the pitch, especially when you are fatigued. If you are stronger, it helps you deal with that.

Timing beats speed and I'm very strong at my weight.

There are a few moments in every game when I will have to sprint and use my explosiveness to win.

I feel like I'm a very athletic back, and I'm capable of doing more than one thing.

I can move, I'm very shifty and at the same time I'm big.

With speed skating, it's like doing one-legged squats over and over again, with that one leg absorbing more than 80 percent of your weight. It takes an enormous amount of strength, and you're in such a weird position.

I don't have a sprinter's body.

I could jump, I was quick, I could catch and all those types of things, but when it came to just flat out speed, that's something I had to work really hard at.

The advantage doesn't come because you can run more than someone over 90 minutes. The advantage comes when, in the tenth minute, I'm sprinting back and making another guy chase me. By the end of the game, that guy's worn down, but I can still keep going at the same pace.

By the time I was 15 and I stepped in the high school gym, I was just stronger than everybody.

I don't want to get too detailed into it, but when you're a good high school running back, you can almost be whatever type of runner you want to be. If you're a good size and a good athlete, you can be whatever type of runner you want.

I used to be known as one of the strongest guys on the planet.

I can still run in a straight line, and I can still throw a punch.

I've been doing a lot of different cross-training and kickboxing and Capoeira and kite surfing, and I've just really been back to what I consider my original athletic self.