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Parked in a spare chair, I am wedged with knees up against the gym wall. The drill is simple: holding on tight to the ball at arms' length above your head, smash it into the wall hard and repeatedly for 30 seconds. Switch to 20 rebounds - throw hard at wall, catch on return - as fast as you can, and repeat.

It's a Murray special. When he was brought in to coach the team three years ago, the players' conditioning was acceptable but not world-beating. It's now world-beating but not acceptable, if Murray's caustic commentary is anything to go by.

"We had a guy rupture his tear-duct doing this," he says with satisfaction. "Water pouring down his face." I get to two minutes before lactic leaves my triceps and shoulders burning. "Terry's up to nine minutes. But I want more."

Terry takes over for the wheelchair drills. Lean of torso and muscled of arm, he shows me how to get maximum distance from each push on the wheels (lean forward, reach back, push all the way through), how to stop (grab hard, prepare to lose skin) and how to turn (grab, lean and go).

"Getting used to a chair is like a baby learning to walk," he says. "Forget about your legs - your arms are now your legs and your arms."

The hardest part is getting going. In a game full of start and stop, inertia is everyone's enemy. Once we have completed lap after lap of the indoor arena, accelerating hard for two pushes, slamming to a stop and going again, Terry clamps on to the back of my chair to double the resistance.

If everything in the upper body hurts, the fingers and hands take the brunt of it. While fat yellow calluses line Terry's palm, thin skin keeps slicing off mine. When hands snatch at wheel-rims to slow down or turn, fingertips inadvertently enter the whirling blur of spokes and come out bloodied.

"I've broken my thumb, broken my wrist, dislocated my shoulder," says Terry with a grin, before coming straight for me at pace and then flipping up on one wheel with a flick of the hips and accelerating round and past.

In the right hands, the chairs can dance and dart like the Minis of the The turning-circle is tiny, the acceleration away eye-watering. Anchored by a thick Velcro strap across the lap, Terry can stop on a Smartie, lean out low to snatch up a stray ball and be away down the court while you are still trying to calculate your angle of approach.

A course is set up, with two tight coned-off squares 15 metres apart. Players start stationary in between, accelerate to one end, spin 180 degrees, speed to the other end, spin and return at pace to the middle. It's all done flat out, every 30 seconds, until 10 reps have been completed.

It's brutal, a relentless examination of speed and recovery. Terry averages 13.2 seconds per lap. By the end he's in pieces, out of his chair and good for nothing but spicy gestures in Murray's direction.

When I try, it's like pushing through glue. One arm is stronger than the other, resulting in a push that takes me at a drunken angle straight through the tripod supporting the timing beam.

Stopping the chair results in more skin being separated from palm. Turning is even harder, an endless succession of tiny adjustments that recalls the infamous and sends my average time spiralling into the mid-20s.

Doing the same drill with a ball in hand renders it almost impossible. The ball must be bounced every two pushes, just as it must every two paces in the able-bodied game, which leads to a woeful one-armed zig-zag from the newcomer and the easiest of poaching opportunities if the ball is left parked on the lap.

More difficult still is the hoop-shooting. The baskets are at the same height as in able-bodied basketball, which turns an ordinary three-point attempt into an epic long-distance drainer. Even a simple lay-up (roll in at an angle, aim for the backboard rebound) requires a much finer judgement of trajectory and speed.

To watch Terry and his fellow pro Jon Pollock land shot after shot is like watching a golfer roll successive long-range putts home from the very edge of the green. That Jon is paralysed from the waist down, and so both lower in his chair and unable to use anything but arm, wrist and shoulder to generate power and direction, is easy to forget; he finds the hoop with relentless ease.

"We play ten-minute quarters, compared to the 12 minute ones in the NBA, but they'll only out-score us by 20 or so points," says Terry. To extend the comparison, Jon and Terry would expect to make 55-60% of their field goals; and average 45% and 48% respectively. Those NBA legends are around 32% on three-pointers; Jon and Terry 40-45%.

Next up for the team is the in Manchester later this month, when they take on the old adversaries of Australia, USA and Canada. In July comes the World Championships in Birmingham, where the team hope to go one better than the silver they won in 2002, their previous best performance in a global tournament.

For Murray it's not just a question of which players are in the best shape or form, but which combination he can field.

Each player in wheelchair basketball has a different numerical classification, depending on their disability. Terry, who was born without a tibia or fibia in his left leg, is a four; a player with full paraplegia below the chest a one. The five players on court at any one time cannot add up to more than 14.

"My assistant is very good at maths," jokes Murray, but the regulation is what makes the sport so special: it's one of the few disabled sports where all different categories can play together in the same team.

Before then, there's a lot more conditioning work to be done. "This isn't the most talented team in the world, but we're the fittest and the hardest working," says Terry.

Murray waits for him to roll away to begin our beep test before replying. "Terry's got enormous talent - there's games when he's almost unbelievable - but he's not consistent enough. He's a larrikin, and you've got to push him."

At level five, I drop out, arms and shoulders spent. Terry goes through to level 15 before wheeling away in exhaustion.

"You big girl!" shouts Murray, and gives me a surreptitious wink.