Imagine you are Courtney Lawes. You operate in one of the most physically intense positions on the field for club and country since September and have had just two free weekends in four months. Starting with last Saturday's Bath game and continuing with the visit of Harlequins on Friday night, Northampton have four hugely significant matches in a row. Once that is all done, a hectic, demanding Six Nations Championship awaits.

Lesser men would collapse at the prospect, never mind the reality. By the time the 24-year-old Lawes is finished in June he will have played upwards of 30 matches, with England team-mates Chris Robshaw and Dylan Hartley set to do likewise if they stay healthy. One day we will look back and wonder how such workloads could ever be regarded as normal. To expect anyone, let alone a forward, to maintain optimum performance throughout is increasingly unrealistic.

Happily, Lawes is a glutton for punishment, having become a first-time father this autumn as well. He also now appreciates that smashing the living daylights out of opponents carries a hidden health warning for the enforcer. "It dawned on me that it is a long old season and you can't be making those hits, especially if you don't time them properly because you're too excited or too anxious to make them. That's when you get injured. Since I've stopped trying to make them, I've been able to find them a bit easier."

Those on the receiving end may not spot the difference – Martin Johnson once suggested there is an audible difference to the sound of air leaving a tackled player's body when Lawes is involved – but Lawes has, touch wood, finally overcome the injuries that interrupted the early years of his career. "As you get older your body hardens up a bit. I was throwing myself about from a really early age and that didn't really help. When I got to 22 I was in a bad way. I do a lot more weights now to try and make sure my body's more protected."

Yet here's the perverse thing. The more Lawes plays and the less he goes hunting for the "king hits", the better his form has been. Now established in the England second row alongside Joe Launchbury, he is calling the lineouts and maturing – "in terms of defensive structures and the technical bits I'm vastly better" – into a player any international team would want. He believes an unbroken run of games, far from wearing him out, has been the making of him. "It helps with everything, not least being able to read the game better and reacting quicker to situations," he says. "If you understand certain things are going to happen before they happen it's massive. I like to think I've got quite a good rugby brain and I try and learn on the pitch as I'm going. When you're injured you can't do that. It makes it a lot harder."

Quins may have struck a rich vein of form recently – the standard of their off-loading and passing against Exeter was top class and they boast the tightest defence in the league – but they will do well to smash through a Saints pack with so much spare muscle that England's Tom Wood starts on the bench.

Even Northampton's chastening home defeat by Leinster last month has had the benefit of concentrating minds over the festive period. "It ended up in a bit of a debacle and we ended up being humiliated," Lawes admits. "It does mean you end up having a rethink, and brings you down to earth and refocuses you for the season."

England could also be the beneficiaries when they commence their Six Nations campaign in France on Saturday 1 February. For now Lawes is more concerned with steering the Saints to the top of the Premiership pile and helping his home-town club qualify for the knockout stages of the Heineken Cup. They are winning games more consistently and the arrival of the coach Alex King has sharpened up their game management. "Since he came in he's had a big influence, making sure we're not too predictable, just got our strategy right, doing different things in our game. We've also been a team on the front foot a lot of the time and that does make it easier to perform."

Quins will be without the injured trio Danny Care, Luke Wallace and Tom Casson but Lawes still expects a stirring confrontation that could just set the tone for a year full of possibilities. "They're kind of a maverick team in the way they can pull something unbelievable out of the bag. That's how they've been put together and how they like to play their rugby. They'll bring their flair, off-loads and their quick game but so do we.

"Weather permitting it'll be a really exciting game. I'm sure the crowd will get behind us and, hopefully, that'll sway some decisions our way and we'll be able to get the win."

Breaking the Lawes at a baying Franklin's Gardens will be no easy task.