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1
Robert Heatley Stand / Re: fitness
Last post by LP -
About half or more of the current injury list probably results from collisions.

We have to consider if we want to play a certain contested game style, we will have a list that suffers more corkies and bruise type injuries, which then lead to the dreaded "soft tissue" problems.

Fan reaction is a little ironic, because if we play bruise free footy brand to avoid collisions fans also react poorly. I'd rather we play the way we currently do, and just accept at stages we will suffer injuries.

I've been banging on about the season long cost of our game style and continual living on the edge results, a situation that is inherently bad for soft tissue type injuries. We need to find a way to generate some easy wins or spates of soft tissue problems will be our never ending fate!

There is a cost for every choice that gets made, ours might be that our strong inside footy contested brand and edge of the seat tactics come with higher soft tissue injury rates.
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Robert Heatley Stand / Re: fitness
Last post by Thryleon -
I dont know what the story is, but I remember being a young tacker, and wanting to really progress my training and working hard to my own detriment.

With experience, came maturity, and with maturity came the understanding that even though I am impatient to play, and gain and re-gain, the experience taught me that rushing back too soon, can often cause more grief.

The coach can only select you, if you are declared fit.  The fitness staff can give you advise, a clean bill of health, build you a program, but they cant feel how each athlete is feeling.  If the athlete thinks they will be ok, but is not certain, the onus on them is to how risky it is for them to play.  You will notice that someone like Walshy, who is the consumate professional, comes back and stars knowing he is right to play.  I reckon Weiters is 50-50 and plays a bit hurt, but he might play within those limitations understanding his body, and another who seems good at picking this is Cripps.  Now Key position players have the benefit, of being present, and not having to compete to provide value, but running players, who we rely on getting up and down the ground need to have a good understanding of their body to declare themselves ok.  If they push that little bit harder, and they arent ready then all of a sudden go ping, that has to be partly on themselves.  We can externalise this to Russell, but IMHO, do so at our own peril.  Last fitness bloke who copped grief about our strength and conditioning was replaced by someone who arguably was worse until we got him.
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Robert Heatley Stand / Re: fitness
Last post by DJC -
One of my brothers did middle distance with East Melbourne Harriers around Cerutty’s time and never missed an opportunity to run up a dune, often with me floundering in his wake 🙄

I suspect that our conditioning is more controlled than dune running … and that may be a problem and something to be discussed in another thread 🙂
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Robert Heatley Stand / Re: fitness
Last post by Lods -
Quote from: DJC on
We could reincarnate Percy Cerutty and appoint him as our fitness guru and we’d still have Cuningham, Marchbank, Martin, Williams and Docherty injured more often than not, as well as the usual, run of the mill, soft tissue injuries and fractures.

I doubt they’d last 5 minutes under Cerutty before their legs blew off.

An interesting point though…
We all know Percy was a bit eccentric, but in amongst the ‘crazy’ there was also some very good practices. My own athletic coach knew Cerutty. I’m not sure how strong the connection was as I wasn’t with her at the time, but I do know she used some of his methods, and some of her athletes trained at Portsea, despite being NSW based, There was definitely some sharing of ideas, despite the fact that Percy’s focus was middle and long distance, and my coach was more concerned with sprinter, hurdler, jumper events.
One of the things she was ‘big on’, was laying a foundation fitness base during the Winter before attacking the more explosive work in the Spring/Summer. We trained as middle distance runners during that off-season. I think it stood us in pretty good stead because I don’t remember too many soft tissue injuries amongst our group.
One of the key features of this foundation period was the time we spent running up ‘bloody’ sand dunes and in soft sand along the beach. I’ve seen pictures of the Giants training in the dunes at Wanda Beach. I wonder whether we incorporate it in our conditioning period.

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Robert Heatley Stand / Re: AFL Rd 10 2024 Pre Game Prognostications Carlton vs Sydney
Last post by Mantis -
I wasn’t confident about our clash with Melbourne and expected us to lose. With what will be available in our list, I am even less confident that we will win this one against Sydney. Even though we beat both sides in the finals last season, and just got over the line last week against the Demons. I just hope they don’t belt us. I hope we don’t get more injuries to worry about fighting to stay in the game. I might pray to the footy gods.
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Robert Heatley Stand / Strength, Conditioning and Injury prevention
Last post by DJC -
We could reincarnate Percy Cerutty and appoint him as our fitness guru and we’d still have Cuningham, Marchbank, Martin, Williams and Docherty injured more often than not, as well as the usual, run of the mill, soft tissue injuries and fractures.