Inside Leeds Rhinos’ ‘hellish’ pre-season as Brad Arthur pushes players to limit

The old adage is that the hard work starts when the Super League season gets underway: but at Leeds Rhinos, the hard work has been ongoing for a number of months now.

In truth, Leeds‘ players should have known the writing would be on the wall for what was ahead in pre-season training before the end of last season.

A clip from their recent documentary saw Arthur lay bare to his squad what he was going to subject them to ahead of his first full season in charge in 2025: and he didn’t mince his words.

“Don’t expect me to reinvent the wheel for you in pre-season,” Arthur told the players. “You’re going to work hard, you’re going to f*cking work hard in the gym and you are going to lift f*cking heavy.

“You’re going to get stronger, you’ll be fitter and you will be better at the f*cking simple fundamentals of the game. I’m not here to babysit you.”

And guess what? Arthur wasn’t lying.

Whether the evidence of their work will be laid out today when Leeds host Wakefield in their first Super League game of 2025 remains to be seen. But some of the Rhinos’ senior players – who have had 10, 15 or even more pre-season campaigns in their careers – count this year as one of the toughest they have ever endured.

It has been a blistering, vomit-inducing tonic of more running than they are ordinarily used to, more hills, more wrestle sessions and more intensity. Or as Arthur said months ago: just good old-fashioned hard work.

“He wasn’t lying,” Leeds forward Morgan Gannon tells Love Rugby League.

“We’ve run a lot more and wrestled a lot more. I feel like I’m in one of the best shapes of my career physically. It’s up there as the toughest and most hellish pre-season I’ve known.

“We’ve been tested, let’s juts say that. But it’s good, I think we’ve needed that. We can find out now where we are and we’ll enjoy the season a bit more. People always say you do the hard work in pre-season but I promise you, this year, we have definitely done the hard work. We’ve been pushed to our limits. We’re in it for the long run and it should stand us in good stead.”

It is a sentiment shared right across the squad.

“We’re ready for games to be played now, put it that way,” half-back Brodie Croft smiles. “We’ve had a taste for it in pre-season but I’m glad it’s an earlier start than in the NRL because we’d have a few more weeks of being flogged by BA. He can’t train us as long and hard anymore! It’s been tough, among the toughest I’ve known.”

Croft was categorical when asked to describe an Arthur pre-season – while also shedding some light on the work Leeds have done off the field, too.

He admits: “Lots of runs out on the field, wrestle session and absolute bash-a-thons in the gym and wrestle rooms. A lot of meetings and a lot of detail but it’s all for the common good. No detail has been left to chance.”

That detail is another massive increase on previous pre-seasons at Leeds. Meetings have been longer and more, as Croft admits, detailed – but the hope is that it will stand the Rhinos in good stead to hit the ground running from the get-go.

Even their new signings admit they have been taken aback by it.

“There’s been a lot of everything,” Jake Connor says. “We’ve had contact every day and I’ve had pre-seasons that have been nothing like that. It’s been very tough but I think very rewarding.”

And the hope among the players is that having experienced such tough times in the darkest depths of winter, Leeds will be able to call on those experiences when they are in trouble in games throughout 2025.

Gannon says: “We’ve been in the trenches with each other since day one, putting in graft and being at our limit. And we can look to our left and right and see our mates have done the same. We’re stronger together as a result.”

Connor agrees. “Brad is massive for this club. The stuff we’ve done in pre-season is going to mould our year. But it’s time for everyone to step up and take this club back to where it deserves to be.

“It brings us closer together really quickly as a group. That bonding is what you need and the tough pre-seasons generally lead to the more successful seasons.”

The real business of Super League and the challenge of restoring the Rhinos to the competition’s upper echelons begins for real today. But in reality, Leeds have been preparing for this moment for weeks on end.

And Arthur has certainly taken them to their limit.