Trainer Claire Dallison's gruelling basketball sessions have become part of local sporting legend.

She's been knocking the Nelson Giants into shape now for the past 12 seasons and yesterday, some of the region's elite rugby players joined in the fun.

Dallison together with Tasman Makos' rugby team trainer Simon Thomas put around 30 Makos squad members, including 10 Academy players, and 15 basketballers through an hour-long speed session at Tahunanui Beach as part of a new cross-code pre-season training exercise.

Dallison adheres to a fairly basic, but highly effective, philosophy.

"Get in, work, chunder and leave," she said. And although a relatively light-hearted explanation of her methods, she's serious about working athletes to their limits.

"I have a reputation to uphold and it will be intact by the end of the session,"she quipped prior to yesterday's workout.

Thomas studied under Dallison for five years at the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology before qualifying with a Bachelor of Sport and Recreation degree in 2008. The pair subsequently put their heads together and came up with a plan to unite the region's elite rugby and basketball talent in a combined session.

"It's just to bring the two main teams in Nelson together really, so that they're seen as working together rather than in competition – which we're definitely not," Dallison said. "We're very supportive of each other.

"And also, Simon's been my student for the last five years, so we've learnt a lot together in that time and it's going to be quite fun for us to work together and train people because we have a very similar training philosophy.

"It's just an opportunity to have a bit of fun and just do something different for those boys. Pre-season stuff gets tedious, so it's about variety and it's about something different."

Thomas replaced Wayne Taylor as the Makos' trainer last year and despite unsuccessful attempts to establish a combined pre-season programme last year, this time everything had fallen neatly into place.

"I studied under Claire at NMIT and worked pretty closely with her so we're just trying to tie our programmes together a wee bit so that we can get the guys rubbing shoulders and seeing what the athletes from the other sports in the same local area do," Thomas said.

"It gives them a slightly different environment as well."

He said the Makos players would be feeling the pinch.

"Our guys were pretty tired already because I hammered them pretty hard [on Monday night]. A few of them went away and enjoyed the [Wellington] sevens, so they work hard when they get back.

"Us working hard is what makes us who we are, so we're just getting plenty of that done at the moment."

He said he was pleased with the Makos' pre-season fitness levels.

"We're tracking pretty well at the moment actually. Most guys are actually ahead of where they were at this stage last year, which is good, because even at this stage last year, we were ahead of where we were the year before.

"They're just learning to come back better and better prepared every year, which helps. The environment we've built over the last couple of years, the guys are just working hard to make things tick over that much better. When one guy works hard and everyone else follows, it definitely helps you run the programme."

Dallison said she would also be encouraging Thomas to adopt a new supplement programme, currently being used by the Giants, involving a daily dose of blackcurrant powder, mixed with water or juice, in an effort to aid their recovery in their pre-season training.

"We've had some fairly positive results from the blackcurrant trials we're doing," she said. "We've just been number crunching over the last week and they're actually showing some pretty cool recovery rates – probably 25 per cent better than a person not on it."