Steve Round has lifted the lid on a brutal pre-season regime which includes gruelling runs at the crack of dawn.
But while getting Everton's players up to peak fitness is key, the Blues assistant boss says reacquainting them with the ball is equally important.
Laying out the coaching plan for the Club's five-day training camp in Austria, which has already seen some hard yards put in under blistering heat, Round told evertontv: "Initially, we want to get the players physically fit and back in tune with a football, making sure their touches are good, their awareness is good, and it's a slow progression from there really.
"Being a coach, I always prefer to work with the ball and I think the players do to, and we do tend to do nearly all our work with the ball.
"Sometimes to get them fit you do have to run without it. But most of the work we do, nine times out of 10, will be with the ball.
"We do train them quite hard. It's three sessions a day, every day. We start with an early morning run at 7am, then football at 11am and then maybe running or conditioning work in the afternoon. So it's tough. But they get plenty of rest too, and I think actually they secretly quite enjoy it."
