EVEN now, with all the added exposure and analysis that surround the game, it's still easy to fall into the trap of stereotyping the piano players and the piano shifters. Your half-backs are the brain, and your front row the brawn. The greater the bulk, the less the IQ.

Ray McLoughlin, in his time, would've had something to say about that, and more recently, Keith Wood emerged as an articulate and innovative thinker on just about every subject known to man. So, with Cian Healy, you mightn't want to judge the book by the cover.

If chance had him growing up in one of the old Eastern bloc countries instead of Dublin's northside, he would surely have found himself in some weightlifting arena throwing inordinate amounts of iron above his head. An athletic, explosive, powerhouse fast-tracking towards the Olympic Games.

When he sits his 17 and a half stone frame down for a chat about what the season holds, Healy has probably just come from throwing inordinate amounts of iron above his head, but the weights are a means to an end. And that end is a permanent place on the loose head side of Leinster's scrum, and down the line, ditto with Ireland.

"I actually enjoy watching all that strongman stuff, but I wouldn't be an aspiring meathead," he says. In fact, when he isn't sweating out three squats of 290 kilos each, three bench presses of 150 kilos and three power cleans of 145 kilos – which, the meatheads inform us, is some pretty impressive lifting – he's likely to be found indulging in a more gentle pursuit.

Painting is his thing. "It's not like I'd be standing up at the top of the team bus with a sketch pad or anything like that, but sometimes if I've had a mad week, it's good to get away from rugby. I don't think I could hang onto it 24/7. I was really into the graffiti style at school and I did a number of art projects in that area. Now it's acrylic, modern stuff."

Not that he'll have much downtime following the intense build-up to last night's clash with Munster and the start of another Heineken Cup campaign. For the moment, the focus is on a much darker art.

In the 2007-08 season, Healy was in and out of the side as he attempted to cope with the transition from underage rugby to the real thing. Readily confessing to having been "thrown about" by hard-core scrummagers such as Jean-Baptiste Poux of Toulouse, he was better prepared when Michael Cheika gave him an opportunity en route to Leinster's triumph last season.

With South Africa's World Cup winner, CJ van der Linde, out of commission and with Stan Wright covering the tight head slot, Healy started in all three games in the knock-out stages. He more than held his own against Mike Ross, who has since joined Leinster from Harlequins, then against John Hayes, and finally against both Martin Castrogiovanni and Julian White in the Murrayfield decider.

"I still don't feel I've nailed down the loose head spot with Leinster at all," he explains. "You've Ronnie McCormack putting pressure on me as it is, Stan is well capable of playing loose head, and obviously CJ is coming back as well, and he's an unbelievable scrummager on both sides. So things are just heating up now."

If his caution is understandable, those performances at the business end of the Heineken Cup have put him in line for a first international cap next month, perhaps in the middle game against Fiji. Although props tend to develop late – Healy only turns 22 on Wednesday – he appears to have all the attributes.

"I can see him playing for Ireland for a long, long time," says Ollie le Roux the veteran Springbok prop who was one of Healy's mentors during his time at Leinster. "I've played with Cian and I know what he's capable of. He's got such potential. He's certainly one of the modern generation of front rowers, very athletic, very mobile, good workrate, well capable of putting in big hits. But if there is one weakness, and that's if you could call it a weakness, it's the scrummaging aspect of his game."

Le Roux believes that Ireland should hasten slowly, using him off the bench, bringing him gradually to the boil at international level. Whereas the South African sees a gifted player like Luke Fitzgerald as the exception who had nearly all the basics sorted at an early age, he likens Healy more to Jamie Heaslip and to Rob Kearney who had to prove themselves bit by bit.

"Props obviously receive a fairly serious pounding at the top level, so a lot of it is about how a player matures physically. It's often better to go slowly. Take a young bull, he's only really mature after six years, but he can walk with the big bulls after three. I hope that Ireland ease Cian in because he's going to be around for a long time. I'd expect him to be the cornerstone of the pack in the future."

You don't have to be a dark-art specialist to side with Le Roux's assessment. If Marcus Horan loses the edge he's had over the competition for the past eight years or so, Healy is clearly next in line. He needs more experience, and he needs to curb a tendency to give away the occasional needless penalty, but the promise and the power are unquestionable.

On the back of a Heineken Cup winner's medal and an emphatic Churchill Cup success with Ireland A, his first season in the frontline appeared to be blemish-free, but then there was Keith Earls's try in the Magners League game at Thomond Park last April when he had a chance to snuff out the danger, and blew it.

His older sister, Adrienne, knocked some black humour out the moment by sending Earls a text congratulating him on what was a perfect hand-off. "She wound me up quite a bit as well after I got home," he says, "but on a more serious note, it's not something I was able to forget in a hurry. Keith caught me with a good hand-off and I didn't have the pace to get after him. Kurt McQuilkin [Leinster's defence coach] spoke to me about it afterwards. A hand-off shouldn't be that difficult to deal with, just slap it down and make the tackle."

As for Leinster's defence of the title which gets under way against London Irish at the RDS on Friday, there hasn't been the slightest hint of complacency. "It's not as if we're walking around the place saying we're the champs. There's a feeling that it's done, in the past, and we'll probably be targeted now. We just have to deal with that."

While some of the more venerable members of the Leinster squad might have reached a pinnacle last season, Cian Healy's climb to possibly greater heights is only starting.

mjones@tribune.ie