Essendon's playing group will remain in Melbourne this pre-season as the club moves away from the full playing group attending an altitude camp.

Only a handful of Bomber stars will head to Boulder, Colorado in December to take part in the training with the rest of the group to train at the True Value Solar Centre.

Coach James Hird said the group would sweat out an intense pre-season campaign at its new state of the art facility.

"We won't do a big main group of altitude training, we will have. Small group of four or five guys that will go over to Colorado late in December," Hird said.

"The main squad will come in two parts - the first to four years in early November and I think ten or twelve days later the older guys come in.

"We will stay here, we have a great new facility, the best facility in Australia so we are going to base ourselves here for three or four months.

"We will train pretty hard, it will be a meat and potatoes type pre-season but one were we work on all things we need to work on to get them in the conditioning they need to be in throughout the year."

Essendon sent a group of ten to Boulder in 2013 pre-season before sending the entire playing group other than the development group at the start of the 2014 pre-season.

One player that will join his new teammates for the first time will be Irish recruit Conor McKenna who is set to return with the first to four year players in early November.

"The reputation he has from he people in Ireland and the people that have seen him play is huge without putting too much pressure on him," Hird said.

"In terms of the the Irish experiment well it is no longer an experiment.

"There is so many players now that have come over here and fitted into AFL football, not just being average footballers but being outstanding AFL footballers.

"The hand eye coordination, skills but also physical ability are all attributes Conor has and we are very excited about welcoming him here."