Inside features
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I’ve been involved in a team that won three games for the year. Expectations then were that you go out and get within six goals. But footy has changed now and everyone goes out and expects to win games of footy. – Daniel Giansiracusa on Crunch Time
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BULK ORDER! How scienc e is building premiership physiques
Essendon and Adelaide have made notable advances this season, partly on the back of big summers in the weights room, writes DR JODI RICHARDSON.
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FL players need to be powerful athletes who can tackle, break tackles and contest a ball with courage and conviction. The strong physique, strength and power AFL players need to be competitive in such a highly contested game takes years of specialised training. Developing strength in players, coupled with the endurance needed to cope with the intensity of the sport, is the role of the high performance and conditioning staff but comes at the direction of the senior coach. It can have a huge impact on success as we are seeing with a number of clubs this year. Strength in the AFL is not about how much you can bench or squat, it’s about functional strength. The kind of body strength that means a player, like Chris Judd, can stay on his feet while contesting the ball and dispose of it under duress with some control. It’s the kind of strength that gives a player the confidence to repeatedly embrace a contest and recover quickly. Today’s game is highly congested: player density has doubled over the past 10 years and teams can find themselves fighting for possession under circumstances where there are 36 players in one third of the ground. Having lacked physical presence in 2011, and
POWER-PACKED: Brent Stanton.
losing almost as many matches as it won, Essendon put an emphasis this season on bulking up its players. At eight wins from nine rounds, it appears this change is working. Essendon recruited former Geelong high performance coach Dean Robinson (below) who after leaving Geelong worked with Gold Coast in 2011. Dubbed “the weapon”, Robinson has been training the Bombers hard to create powerful athletes. It’s not just about size, it’s about adding lean muscle to increase a player’s power to weight ratio. Adelaide is another club putting a big emphasis on player size this year. New coach Brenton Sanderson inherited a superbly fit team as this was the focus of his predecessor Neil Craig, but the players didn’t have enough size for his liking. It was evident that this shift in training emphasis was taking effect as the majority of the new 2012 guernseys delivered just after Christmas didn’t fit the players. They had added muscle bulk around the chest and shoulders. “We like to condition our players to play a lot more aggressive brand of footy,” Sanderson told ABC radio. “To play that contested style that you demand in finals footy you need to have the type of body that can back it up. “Having come to the club to see the condition the players were in – fantastically fit and aerobically in tremendous condition – but probably lacking the bodies to play that bash and crash style.” Sanderson is including more physical training drills, more boxing, wrestling and grappling – “activities that release that inner aggression”, he said. Gaining lean muscle mass takes a lot of hard work and can’t be achieved without a sound nutritional plan. Skeletal muscles are made up of many long thin parallel muscle fibres. They are bundled together and attach to the skeleton via tendons. A typical muscle, such as the biceps, contains thousands of muscle fibres. Muscle growth predominantly comes from the growth of each fibre, as opposed to an
increase in the number of muscle fibres. Adelaide Crows physical performance manager Stephen Schwerdt says that for the Crows, it’s all about developing strength in the players that can be used in a functional way in a contest. “We’ve had about 10-12 new players to the club this year and there are two agendas,” Schwerdt said. “One is about putting on some size with hypertrophy training. The other is about technique, so when they get more developed and stronger, they need to be good lifters to develop power with more complex lifts.” Hypertrophy training is weight training to increase muscle mass. A typical program will at first include three sets each of a range of large muscle exercises such as the bench press. For each of the three sets, eight to 12 repetitions of the lift are completed. If more than 12 reps can be done, the weight is too light. If eight reps can’t be achieved, the weight is too heavy. As the muscles adapt to a training program, more reps can be completed on the starting weight so the weight has to be increased. This is called progressive overload. The strength of a muscle is proportional to its size (cross-sectional area, to be exact). Once a good strength base has been achieved, Crows players are introduced to complex power lifts such as power cleans, squats, snatch and jumping moves such as squat jumps. “Our strength guys spend a lot of time on technique so that we can teach them how to lift properly in key lifts and develop power but do it safely,” Schwerdt said. “Core strength is also an integral part of our strength training.” To be powerful, an
e im t f o t lo a d n e p s ‘We ers y la p r u o e t a c u d e trying to f o ls a t n e m a d n u f e about th WERDT H C S N E H P E T S – nutrition.’ Inside Football
CUT CROW: Scott Thompson looking fit as a fiddle.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
AFL player needs to be able to produce force quickly. The more force that can be produced or the more quickly that force can be produced, the more powerful a player can be. In order to put on size, Schwerdt explains that nutrition is just as important as what’s done in the gym. “We spend a lot of time trying to educate our players about the fundamentals of nutrition so they can maximise their work in the gym,” Schwerdt said. Carbohydrates are needed in the diet to fuel training and match performance, as well as to preserve energy stores in the muscles and liver. Carbs also promote recovery by replenishing used energy stores, promoting protein synthesis and reducing protein breakdown in the muscles due to its effects on insulin. Since muscles are primarily made of it, protein is a very important part of an AFL player’s diet. To ensure adequate amounts are consumed, the Crows supplement with whey protein
isolate powder (typically mixed with water or milk) 30 minutes before and immediately after weight training. As well as needing strength and power, players also need to be able to cope with the endurance demands of a game. “We’re fortunate that a number of our young players are pretty good endurance wise so they can spend the majority of their time on their strength putting on size,” Schwerdt said. “There is research that strength training can improve your endurance performance so the two are not counterproductive at all. We try to prioritise what’s needed for • Continued Page 27
Magner pick right on the ‘money’ EVERYONE LOOKS FOR value in the rookie draft. Some find it, some don’t but due to the relatively low risk involved, it is the place for taking a punt on an unfashionable player. This is where the principles of “Moneyball” – finding players whose statistics defy their reputations – come in to play. After being overlooked in his draft year with the Dandenong Stingrays in 2005 and then again in 2006 after spending the season as an over-age player in the TAC Cup, Melbourne’s James Magner has had to do things the hard way. Instead of running around on the MCG like teammate Nathan Jones, Magner made a living as a directional driller for a construction company. Footy-wise, he headed to Frankston in the VFL before a move to Sandringham last year, and a string of strong performances pushed his name in front of recruiters. “Towards the end of last year, I didn’t think I’d be really playing AFL, so to come from there and be playing, even one AFL game, I was so excited,” he told the Demons website in April. But the biggest challenge he faced, was that he was considered a “dime a dozen”. “I think that there is a few blokes like that. I
think that recruiters every year front up to VFL games and look at blokes like Magner and think ‘yeah he is all right, but is he going to make a difference to our footy team?’” Prendergast said. From that viewpoint, Magner is a case of right place, right time. He has not missed a game since being elevated from the rookie list prior to Round 1. Having trained with the Saints over pre-season after being right under their noses playing for the VFL affiliate Sandringham, Magner appeared destined for St Kilda, as most draft watchers read it. MAGNER: But the Saints felt that they “Moneyball” pick. enough depth in their inside midfield stocks and overlooked him “Ultimately we felt we had players who were playing a similar position,” St Kilda’s head of football Chris Pelchen said over summer. St Kilda’s loss has proved to be Melbourne’s gain with the former Stingray now cemented in the Dees’ midfield. “He had been training at St Kilda and I thought they may have been looking to take him later in that round when we slipped in, but I don’t know that,” Prendergast said. “He is a beauty though, we liked him as a recruiting staff. He was a clearance king… if you look at his VFL numbers, they were huge.”
BULK ORDER!
From Page 25
each player and to not do one at the expense of the other.” Research into how strength training effects endurance performance has indeed shown that maximal strength training not only improves strength but improves endurance too. This occurs as a result of improved running economy and muscle power. None the less, finding the right balance of strength and endurance training is a challenge for high-performance coaches. Adding to this challenge is Sanderson’s unprecedented use of the interchange bench. Even with the introduction of the new sub rule where the number of interchange players was reduced to three, the Crows are averaging 155 interchanges a game, nearly 30 more than the average. Former Adelaide Crows recruiter Matthew Rendell comments that the league’s concerns about the increased use of the bench prompted the change from four to three interchange players. “The league were worried about the number of interchanges getting to 150 so they brought in the sub rule and now the Crows have gone beyond that two years later,” Rendell said. “They got to 168 rotations in the game against Carlton at Etihad. “The players are still covering reasonable distances but are doing it at greater speed in short bursts.” How all this relates to injury for players is an important question, but one not easily answered. The long list of Bombers who sustained soft tissue injuries earlier this season was linked to their gruelling training load. It’s not a simple question to answer. Young and physically immature players need time to develop physiques that can enable them to withstand the rigours of the game and it’s been shown that overtraining can lead to injury. This is why players are so closely monitored. Some
rookies need up to three years of specialised training to get their bodies to a level where they are physically mature enough to be physically competitive in the AFL. Others leave elite junior competitions with the bulk and strength that can see them successfully contesting the ball against older players early in their rookie season. The causes of soft tissue injuries, in general and in the AFL, have been extensively researched and a range of risk factors identified. Dr John Orchard, sports physician and co-author of the AFL Injury Report, discovered that the strongest risk factors for a soft tissue injury were a recent history of that injury or a history of the same injury. In his research paper investigating risk factors for muscle strains in the AFL, Orchard reported that “history of one type of muscle strain increased the risk for certain types of other muscle strains. Age was determined to be a risk factor for hamstring and calf muscle strains and quadriceps muscle injuries were more common in shorter players. “Quadriceps muscle injuries were significantly more common in the dominant kicking leg, whereas hamstring and calf muscle injuries showed no difference in frequency between the dominant and non-dominant legs.” More recent research has shown that a difference in stiffness between left and right legs appears to be related to soft tissue injuries in AFL players. The recent spate of injuries to Essendon players can’t be linked simply to training load. A multitude of factors could be involved. “There are so many factors that contribute to soft tissue injuries,” Schwerdt added. “It could be related to the amount of high speed running a club does, the timing of sessions, the age of the athlete and the load. All of these factors, and others, contribute to soft tissue injuries.”
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Inside Football
Wednesday, May 30, 2012