HAWTHORN players will be pushed to their limits during their 12-day pre-season camp in South Africa, as the club prepares itself for an assault on back-to-back premierships.
The Hawks leave Melbourne on Sunday morning bound for the Royal Bafokeng Sports Campus, around an hour-and-a-half's drive north of Johannesburg, where they will spend the first week of the camp.
From there they will relocate to Stellenbosch, near Cape Town in the country's south-west.
The Bafokeng complex was used as a base by the English soccer team during the 2010 World Cup.
Both locations feature elite standard playing fields, gym and recovery facilities.
South Africa was chosen for its warm climate, with Hawthorn believing training in the heat provides long-term fitness benefits.
While there will be some time for sightseeing during the trip, Hawks football manager Chris Fagan warned it would be no holiday.
"It will be a very hard training and conditioning camp," Fagan said.
"The last day will be an opportunity to look around Cape Town and do some different things, like go to Robben Island and visit where Nelson Mandela was in prison, but other than that it's head down, backside up and train hard for two weeks, and get a good conditioning block in."
Young midfielder Jed Anderson will stay home, having only recently been released from hospital following a serious bout of pneumonia.
But Ryan Schoenmakers, Matt Suckling, Alex Woodward and Brendan Whitecross will all take part as they continue their recovery from anterior cruciate ligament reconstructions.
Fagan said all four were making good progress through the different stages of rehabilitation, with Woodward and Suckling, having suffered their injuries before the start of last season, the furthest advanced and on track for a round one return.
Hawthorn has held its pre-Christmas training camp at Mooloolaba in Queensland for the past two years, and Fagan said the club felt it was time for a change of scenery.
"It's to keep the players fresh and challenged," he said.
"Mooloolaba has been good for us, and we'll certainly go there again in the future, but it's just a good opportunity to do something different, and to give our players an experience in another part of the world – a different culture – which is good for their all-round development."
The Hawks' senior players returned from annual leave for the beginning of pre-season training on Monday.
Despite starting later than most rivals, Fagan said the club was confident it would not be disadvantaged come the start of the season, having faced the same scenario last year.
"They (other clubs) have had two weeks' head start, but we played for a month longer than some of them," Fagan said.
"[Last year] we got a really good conditioning block in pre-Christmas, and we were in good shape come early January.
"So it's the same plan.
"We're not looking at other clubs; we're just looking at ourselves and where we need to be.
"So based on that, we should be in good shape."
The group will return from South Africa on December 20.
