Willie Tonga. Source: The Daily Telegraph
Rani Matua, Sandor Earl and Willie Tonga in Thailand.
MOST people who travel to Thailand for New Year's Eve are headed for the Full Moon parties on the island of Koh Phangan, complete with buckets of booze, fire rope-skipping and thousands of revellers.
So the last place you'd expect to find NRL trio Reni Maitua, Willie Tonga and Sandor Earl during the off-season is holed-up 250km away at a 10-day mixed martial-arts boot camp in Phuket.
Intent on avoiding the pitfalls associated with a raft of New Year's parties and silly season celebrations in Sydney, the trio have instead travelled to Thailand for a different take on pre-season training.
And while most of the other 350 NRL stars are enjoying two weeks of respite over the Christmas period, Maitua, Tonga and Earl have been training up to six hours a day in a bid to present themselves in the best possible shape for next season.
Yoga, jiu-jitsu, weights and cross-fit sessions have all formed part of their Thailand adventure, where the trio have set-up a training base at Phuket's infamous Tiger Muay Thai camp.
"We have a mutual friend who runs an MMA gym out of Wentworthville in Parramatta who had talked up coming to Thailand and training," Earl said. "Also being the New Year's break, we figured it would be a good idea to get away from all the bad temptations of being on holidays at this time of the year."Training-wise, you do get a lot of variety. We've done cross-fit beach sessions, weights, one-on-one sessions with jiu-jitsu trainers.
"We do wrestling twice a week at Canberra but I learned a couple of new tricks with what we did. We've even been getting in the ice baths for recovery and doing a bit of yoga.
"The area we're staying in is like a health retreat. Most of the people here are training for a fight or trying to get super-fit so it's all clean food, coconuts and chicken on tap.
"It's like a dream for us. We're all feeling that good."
For Parramatta stars Maitua and Tonga, next season shapes as a monumental challenge with the Eels intent on rectifying the embarrassment of collecting last year's wooden spoon.
One of the primary candidates for the vacant Parramatta captaincy under new coach Ricky Stuart, Maitua has made all the right moves in pre-season, especially his handling of an altercation with Toyota Cup player Shaun Anderson in Kings Cross a fortnight ago.
Maitua, Tim Mannah and Jarryd Hayne are all currently having their leadership credentials assessed by Stuart, with the Eels coach still evaluating who will best suit the captaincy.
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