TEAM England's boxers are spending a week at an elite training camp in Austria as part of their campaign to prepare themselves mentally and physically to challenge for medals at the Commonwealth Games.

The 12-strong boxing squad arrived at the British Olympic Association's Olympic Training Centre at Lofer near Salzburg yesterday (Sunday), along with a team of specialist sports coaches.

Ian Irwin, Performance Director of the English Amateur Boxing Association, said the training camp is the beginning of a carefully prepared training programme designed to ensure England's boxers are in top condition when they step into the ring at Manchester 2002.

"It doesn't matter how good a boxer you are in training, unless you can produce the goods when it matters on a world stage," said Ian.

"When we arrive in Manchester we want our boxers jumping out of their skins. They have got to have a five-star engine inside them and they need the mental toughness to be able to produce the goods on demand, time and time again as they progress through the stages."

The Austrian training camp is focussing on general fitness work rather than boxing specific exercises. There are also team-building exercises to harness team spirit, including raft-riding.

Boxers are also having one-to-one sessions with a sports psychologist to hone their mental toughness, as well as technical assessments with coaches to ensure they are landing clean punches with the right part of their gloves to score maximum points.

Later in the week boxers and team coaches will look at videos of recent performances as an important part of their technical and tactical development.

Experts from the British Olympic Association will also give presentations on the 'Planning for Success' programme, which encourages athletes to keep careful records of their pre-event preparations to ensure they can reproduce the factors that contributed to their success.

Achievements at Austria will be built on at three further training camps in England in the run-up to the Games, when attention will progressively switch to quality sparring.

"We recognise that boxing is very much an individual sport once you step through the ropes, but living together as a team in preparation for and at the Games enables boxers to thrive off each other," said Ian.

"We want to help our boxers to develop team spirit, confidence and mental toughness, so they will be able to focus solely on boxing when they get to the Commonwealths."

Team England's younger boxers will also get the opportunity to learn from some of the more experienced boxers in the squad, like light heavyweight Courtney Fry and featherweight Steve Bell, who both represented England at the 1998 Commonwealth Games in Malaysia.

The full Team England boxing squad for the Commonwealth Games is: Light flyweight (up to 48kg): Darren Langley (born: 14.12.81/lives: Croydon/club: Hollington ABC); Flyweight (up to 51kg): Matthew Marsh (born: 1.8.82 /lives: Welling, Kent/club: West Ham ABC); Bantamweight (up to 54kg): Mark Moran (born: 16.2.82/ lives: Liverpool /club: Golden Gloves ABC); Featherweight (up to 57kg) Steve Bell (born:11.6.75/lives: Ashton-under-Lyme/club: Nichols Police ABC); Lightweight (up to 60kg): Andy Morris (born:10.3.83/ lives: Wythenshawe, Manchester/club: West Wythenshawe); Light welterweight (up to 63.5kg): Darren Barker (born: 19.5.82 /lives: Barnet /club: Repton Boys Club); Welterweight (up to 67kg): Daniel Happe (born: 12.3.76/lives: Bow, London/club: Repton Boys Club); Light middleweight (up to 71kg): Paul Smith (born: 6.10.82/lives: Liverpool /club: Rotunda Amateur); Middleweight (up to 75kg): Steven Birch (born: 25.9.81/lives: St Helens /club: St Helens Town ABC); Light heavyweight (up to 81kg): Courtney Fry (born: 19.5.75/ lives: Liverpool/ club: Salisbury ABC); Heavyweight (up to 91kg); David Haye (born: 13.10.80/ lives: Orpington, Kent /club: Broad Street); Super heavyweight (over 91kg): David Dolan (born: 7.10.79/ lives: Sunderland /club: Plains Farm ABC).

The preliminary rounds and quarter finals of the boxing take place at the Wythenshawe Forum from July 26 to 31. The action moves to the MEN Arena on August 1 for the semi finals, climaxing with the finals on August 3.

Team England boxers are the latest in a growing list of elite sportsmen to make use of the state-of-the-art facilities at British Olympic Association's Olympic Training Centre.

The facility was opened last June as a winter sports training base, and all of British medal winners at this year's Winter Olympics at Salt Lake City trained at the facility.

Athletes from the British Amateur Rowing Association, British Equestrian Federation and British Canoe Union have also used the facility.