Gillingham boss Mark Bonner wants his players to challenge their coaching team throughout the season.

Bonner is big on analysis and holds daily meetings with the squad as he looks to drip-feed his methods since joining the club in May.

After a busy opening week which saw the Gills play three times, they had more hours on the training ground this week ahead of this Saturday’s trip to Fleetwood in League 2.

But the classroom work will continue throughout the campaign, and Bonner welcomes feedback from his players.

“We show a lot of video, we do a lot of unit meetings, we do a lot of individual feedback, all the coaches have got groups of players that they look after to give individual work to,” said Bonner.

“We’re all responsible for different units of the team as well and we do a lot of team meetings.

“We meet every day and show little doses of information, whether that’s things we think we can work on, things we can target at the weekend, things we need to do better.

“I think little and often is really important, we’ve got all the facilities to use touch screens and highlight bits and pieces. We’re quite confident and comfortable talking to the players.

“In a big group it’s hard to get feedback sometimes from them but they’re getting right involved and giving pointers and information, being involved in the meeting rather than just being spoken to and being spoken at.

“The best ones for that are when you get individual and unit meetings and the group is smaller, I think players feel more empowered to have opinions and we want it as well.

“We really want their feedback, we don’t mind being challenged as coaches as well if they think there’s something we should be doing different, better, more of, this is a two-way street to build a winning team. We’re really open to it.

“I’m really pleased that they keep trying to learn as we go.

“The thing I’m happiest with in the last week is we’ve started to get more feedback from them, we’ve started to get more questions from them, I absolutely love that.

“They’re engaged if they’re like that and they feel safe enough to ask the question, that’s means we’re on the way to building some trust and a good environment to work in.”

Bonner disputed the suggestion that extra work in the classroom can add an extra one per cent to their game.

The Gills boss rates the value of analysis so much higher, and getting early benefits in terms of results can only encourage the players to value it even more.

“I probably don’t even see them as one per cent, I see them as 99 per cent, it’s massive - really important,” said Bonner.

“Everything that we do, we think there’s value in and we try not to do too much stuff that doesn’t have any value where we can. We want players to feel that there’s a reason for it.

“I know lots of things we do might be a bit different to what they’ve had before but as long as they can see a value in it that’s important. As long as on the football pitch they see the difference that it’s making or they feel it is helping them, I think that’s a big part of it.

“We’ll try everything we can to make the players better, the ceiling for the team and individuals is really high, there’s loads more to come and it’s our job to find it.

“Winning makes everyone’s life miles easier. We want to go on runs, we want to put together back-to-back wins and runs of winning games.

“We’re constantly aware of not giving too much information but also consolidating and reinforcing information is a really big part of learning together.

“The players’ job is to keep up with us really and stay on board with what we’re doing. I think they’re excited, I think they’re seeing some progress.”