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Robert Heatley Stand / Re: AFL Rd 10 2024 Pre Game Prognostications Carlton vs Sydney
Last post by Lods -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.