Manu Samoa has two weeks before they play their first match in the Rugby World Cup and the coaching staff believe the players' fitness levels will improve before kick-off. 

Samoa takes on Chile on Saturday 16 September (Sunday 2 am Apia Time) at Stade de Bordeaux, which is almost a week after the World Cup starts in France.

Manu Samoa’s Strength and Conditioning Coach, Aitutagata Dave Edgar said there was no doubt that the team would get fitter as they move closer to match day.

He said the team is currently going through their last week of intensive training before they go on a recovery period, which would take away the fatigue and have the players move up a notch in fitness.

“We still have a full week of training, [and] we've had targeted fitness sessions in conjunction with all our rugby, we do what we've just termed it a fight club where it's boxing mixed with often conditioning early in the week at the end of rugby either Tuesday or Wednesday,” said Aitutagata.

“So we've targeted specific running blocks built around rugby skill for positions so we've got one more week of this. What we've had thus far is quite a high volume of training.

“And we've really checked on a lot of bricks of recovery around everything we've done to recover. But we've had to be building to the stage so, yes, we've had a high volume of training.

“What no one will actually see this but what will happen is our volume of training will start to decrease over the next couple of weeks as we move into World Cup games and with that, when the volume drops the intensity goes up, speed goes up, and fitness will improve.”

There will be no more games before the World Cup with the last game against RWC standing leader Ireland. Aitutagata said the Irish game gave them a glimpse of the improving fitness levels of the Manu players. 

“We were quite proud of the fact that the way we fronted up to Ireland, the number one team in the world, and if you looked at that towards the end of the game, they're quite a turnaround for a Pacific team for some more we were to a point running the number one team in the world off the feet, they were slowing down the game,” he said.

“Not saying the job's done for us, we still have work to do. We do daily monitoring to ensure that we don't have a blanket approach to our training conditioning.

“Individuals showing that they are a little bit more fatigued will individualise what we need to do, but yes, our fitness will increase over the next couple of weeks.”

Manu Samoa is pooled with Argentina, England, Japan and Chile. The Rugby World Cup kicks off this weekend.