Manchester United manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer believes Romelu Lukaku needs to lose some muscle to rediscover his best form.
Here, ex-United full back, former strength and conditioning coach at Sunderland and owner of Seed of Speed Michael Clegg explains why...
There are certain things Romelu Lukaku can do to lose muscle, as Ole Gunnar Solskjaer has suggested, without it affecting his overall strength.
If Lukaku does a lot of hypertrophy work - which is eight to 12 repetitions on your squats or bench press - it can cause the sarcoplasm in a muscle to increase.
That's not just the muscle itself but the area around it. It's what bodybuilders do to look bigger and not always functional.
If you reduce those exercises to three to five repetitions, and still do it with quite a heavy load, then it won't give you that same muscle size increase, although the muscle itself will stay really strong.
Lukaku can still train in the gym, that is important, but change the method slightly. You want to minimise the size of the actual muscle system.
With someone like Lukaku, you wouldn't want him doing loads of pounding. You'd look to get him doing aerobic conditioning on a watt bike, or rowing and swimming. That will lessen the physical impact through his system but also lose body mass if this is a combination of things.
We had a player at Sunderland, Jeremain Lens - a Holland international - who put on five kilogrammes of absolute solid muscle after basic pre-season training because his system was extremely adaptive. He didn't get any faster or slower, but you felt like he was a bit heavy.
We changed emphasis of his training, made it more power-based, and took away the volume. It's about being clever with your programme design. His volume was cut but explosive exercises increased and that really benefitted the way he felt.
You don't want size, you want speed, a fast contraction of the muscle. I want lads with big strong legs but built like a wire in their upper body.
Little muscle mass but really strong. Imagine a chunk of a tree: you don't want that. You want a poker for a fire protecting the ball. Both are strong, but one takes more demand on the system and can fatigue quicker.