Manchester United's fitness expert Tony Strudwick says Cristiano Ronaldo has broke the mould in terms physical fitness this season.
"Cristiano has redefined the modern footballer in terms of physical capacity," says United's head of sports science, Strudwick.
With Euro 2008 coming up, Ronaldo, 23, will have played close to SIXTY games for United and Portugal this season.
"The modern player has a lot more asked of him and Cristiano is a top-class professional who is in impeccable shape. He is in the prime of his life and can handle it - we do all we can to give him the best opportunity to perform."
Ronaldo puts in up to six hours a day at United's training ground, but his work does not stop there. Strudwick added: "The one thing which differentiates Cristiano from a lot of players is that he has a plan.
"He approaches it like an individual athlete in athletics would. I call people like him high-performance players because you have to bang out three high-performance games in a week - for example Barcelona, Chelsea, Barcelona.
"Cristiano will be one of the first in every morning, he'll have his breakfast, making sure the nutritional elements are taken care of because he is fuelling his body. He'll start off by doing his strength work, then he has his training with us, then post-training when he'll work on certain areas of his game.
"It's a long day for him - he doesn't come in for a couple of hours and go home. He spends six hours working hard."
