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Cape Town - England coach Eddie Jones has stated he will continue to challenge himself and his coaches to look at other sport's methods and preparation to aid the team.
Jones and his staff have been to events such as Tour de France, Formula 1 and visited England Hockey this year as they look at specialist coaching techniques as well as logistical preparation that could enhance the way England work.
On top of this, England forwards coach Steve Borthwick worked in New Zealand with the British and Irish Lions this summer while defence coach Paul Gustard visited Australian NRL side Melborne Storm and Super Rugby outfit Western Force to pick up new ideas.
These are all part of a process of having the best support staff in the world as Jones looks for small margins they can use to help drive the performance of the team.
“Each part we’ve visited has had a different focus,” he told England Rugby.
“We’ve been out to look at what we can pull back and use for the benefit of the team.
“Staff have got to keep improving, everyone has to keep improving and that is the challenge ahead.
“We need to be the best prepared team in the world because to win the World Cup is going to take an extraordinary performance and to that have that we have to have extra ordinary preparation, so staff development is all part of that.”
One of the areas Jones will use the information from around the sporting world is to target fitness levels of his players.
Test series wins in Argentina and Australia over the past two summers have shown England's improvement but the head coach believes there is still more to come.
"We don’t know how far we can go, that’s the exciting thing for me," said Jones.
“We can be 20% fitter. If you look at the World Cup in 2015, what happened in the last 20 minutes against Wales and Australia? They both won when England were ahead.
“We’ve got to go another level again and we can, and we will.
“This is why we’re so aggressive in looking at other sports and at how you’ve got to push and then how hard you’ve got to recover; it’s a combination and there’s a physical and mental part of it.
“We don’t know how far we can go. That’ the exciting thing for me as we intend to find out."
In terms of preparation for the World Cup in two years, Jones revealed England are 75% done in organising their fixtures and he hopes to play four warm-up games.
He will visit Japan this summer to make plans for England’s tournament in 2019 with France, Argentina, USA and Tonga confirmed in Pool C with Jones' side.
“Now it moves into specific stages as we know who we’re going to play, soon we’ll know where we’re going to play which will be of considerable interest," he added.
“There will two types of weather conditions in Japan. If we play in Sapporo it will be like the weather in England at the moment around 21 or 22 with low humidity, perfect rugby conditions.
“If we play in Tokyo it could 40 degrees and 75% humidity so we need to be able to prepare for both of those and that is part of the staff’s job at the moment.
“Some of them are looking very carefully at heat strategies and how we prepare for the heat in Japan, so it is all clicking into place."
