Scotland are living on UK time during their trip to Kazakhstan in a bid to minimise the effects of travelling across six different time zones.

Alex McLeish's men will play their opening game of the European Qualifying campaign in the central Asian country on Thursday.

And Graeme Jones, the SFA's head of high performance, believes it will help the players be at their best for the crucial tie.

He said: "We have done a huge amount of analysis on where we were coming to and the fact we will be crossing six time zones, while flying east, so you are obviously going forward in time.

"It is a huge amount of strain on your body and rule of thumb is that you need one day recovery for every time zone you cross in order to get back to normal functions.

"We are obviously dealing with elite footballers and we need to do our best to ensure they are in the best condition possible, so in order for crossing six time zone we would probably need around six days in order to get them to that level.

"We spoke with a number of different countries and a number of different clubs and specialists in different areas, and what became very obvious is that the one thing we can control is if we stay on UK time.

"That means we can almost create a bubble effect that will be like an extension of staying in the UK, meaning we are not going to suffer from any of the problems that come with crossing six different time zones and changing your watches, so that's what we have done.

"It might sound really confusing to think why would we have things happening at midnight when to us it is really only 6pm, but the boys will wake up at the normal time, they will have breakfast at the normal time and go to the gym at the normal time they are used to.

"And the most important thing is we will kick off at 3pm UK time which is every footballer's normal time for playing football."

Scotland play Kazakhstan on Thursday before travelling to take on San Marino three days later.

They will be hoping to take the maximum six points on offer in a tough group that also contains Belgium and Russia.