Beach swims, mini-golf and a kick of the footy doesn’t sound like a bad way to spend a Queensland holiday, but according to Physical Performance Manager Mathew Inness, it’ll be anything but as the Western Bulldogs tune up for the opening JLT Community Series game in February.

The Dogs flew to the Sunshine Coast on Wednesday for their now annual training camp for what Inness described as the peak of the pre-season training schedule.

“It’s about two weeks to the first JLT (Community Series) game and it breaks up our post-Christmas period and we want to make sure they do enough load so they can handle it in games, Inness said.

“So we build them up and this is pretty much the top of the tree in terms of training load that they’ll have.”

With temperatures not expected to dip below 30 degrees for the entire trip Inness said the usual skills sessions will be ran alongside iron man sessions and hiking to keep the group mentally fresh.

“We try and keep the skills component similar to what we have [in Melbourne] but then we throw in the beach stuff and other things just as something different to keep them fresh, Inness told westernbulldogs.com.au

“We engage the surf live savers up here and they run an hour for us – we’ve done that the last couple of years - so it’s just good for the boys to get up here and get on the surfboards and have a bit of fun in the surf.”

The Dogs face the Demons in opening game of the JLT Community Series at Victoria University Whitten Oval on February 18 and Inness said that once the camp is over, it’ll be all about the footy.

“Obviously the focus moves more away from building their capacity to getting them ready to play games so it’s a bit of a transition – it continues over the whole year but it’s more about monitoring once the games start up.