Welcome back to Athletes Authority on air. We are on to episode one hundred and eighty four. We continue to tick them off and we've got a couple of people in the studio here. We've got Tommy Watkins. Welcome back mate, two weeks it is mate.
It's good to get a bit of a regular thing going in.
Huge, yeah, huge, and you might be able to sense the nerves through the microphone because Big Alex Burger is in their house.
He is our residence speed guru.
I don't really like using the word guru all the time because an old manager used to say today's guru is tomorrow's hack.
So he is a very talented man.
But he came on board a few months ago with Athletes Authority and really leads out our field program, our speed and conditioning side of things, but also fantastic coach on the floor.
So welcome, thanks you, thank you for having me.
It's obviously good to be in here with some big dogs and talk about some cool stuff.
So yeah, yeah, it's exciting to get you on for a bit of background so people know who you are, because everyone knows who Tommy is.
What have you done? Where have you been?
Obviously your key role at the moment is here with AA along with the Oli Rus. So give us a little bit of a background. I know, if you're into soccer, you'll love it. If you're not into soccer, you might tune out. But Burch hit us up for what the past sort of decade has been for you.
Yeah, so football has always been been my passion. Never was good enough as a player, so for me, the next best thing was to kind of get involved in a strength and conditioning capacity and sort of still be in and around it.
I spent about.
Six years in the UK working for various different football clubs in academy settings, and then sort of when Covid hit took a specific interest in speed and sort of developing speed for footballers, and then kind of mash that all together with my role at AA, and then concurrently with working with the Oli Rus when we're in camp, which happens kind of within FIFA windows. So yeah, kind of working those two things.
And for those overseas, Oli Rus are our Olympic representative soccer team or typically under twenty ones per se.
Under twenty three three bad twenty threes Nash, Yeah, Yeah, under twenty three is men's national teams, So that keeps me busy at different times throughout the year. And yeah, cool to be able to put that together with what we do here at AA.
So one hundred percent and it is. It is obviously a speed theme today. Hence I've got burge on Tommy's not that fast, but we thought it would bring them anyway because it's available. But let's kick off with a little bit of discussion, which is quite topical at the moment. We see going back and forth a lot between speed coaches versus strength editioning coaches that maybe teach speed in
team sport. You've worked with both a real pure speed side of things through Roger Fabri's academy along with team sport.
Athletes a lot.
What's your take on the fact where we'll see an argument to say team sport athletes run differently, therefore they should be trained differently, versus they're still going to want to identify proper shapes, proper technique. We want to hone in on that and we know that it will bleed down to what they need into team sport.
Where where do you sit with that?
Because obviously your current role is pretty much training speed for if it's not the only ruse which are all teams sport athletes. It's our athletes here, which our team sport athletes. But also a mixed shure. You we had May running Yesterdayho's a boxer. You know she got out on track obviously for conditioning. Good to mix it up on stuff. But you're still teaching shapes, positions, all these
type of things. So talk to us a little bit around your suppose mentality or your reasoning and principles around the application of it.
Yes, So for me, I think the main difference is people I'm on neither side of the fence in the sense that some people argue that field sport athletes don't need to be trained like track athletes. They make slightly different shapes. Their starting position isn't off the blocks, for example, and that you know that the things that apply to a track athlete don't necessarily apply directly to a field sport athlete.
I think for me, they make similar shapes.
So becoming a more efficient mover is going to a positive flow and effect to field spoort athletes, even if you make slight changes. And where the difference for me really comes for field athletes is that acceleration piece in that with a field track athlete. A track athlete, sorry, we're trying to really teach them to project from the blocks, and that's not always applicable for a field athlete. You're
constantly moving. So the way I kind of think about it is that applying force quicker to the floor in a field athlete is more relevant to say, a track athlete, where they're trying to really project and produce really high forces, particularly in the first couple of steps.
I think acceleration across we mentioned before me and Tomy discussing around court and field athletes. Field athletes obviously will have that max velocity component.
They certainly do.
Court athletes don't really reach that max velocity component. So when we talk about acceleration, I think a lot of people agree that acceleration I say it a lot that acceleration something that is probably the most influence that we can have when we're talking gym setting again, I'm almost sick of the argument of people saying, you know, you have to sprint to get faster, Like, surely everyone knows that now. I feel like we probably don't need to keep harping on at about that. But when we talk
about gym involvement and strength conditioning involvement. There's always been that mindset for me that I could influence acceleration the most in the gym those first couple of steps. And to your point you've just said that, realistically, when we look at a track athlete, it is off that stop, that block start, it's locking into a position and on that gun, just producing as much fucking force as you can. When we're talking field, as you said, often they are
on the move, they're in different positions. What type of drilling, what type of things do you look at to use, whether it be in a team environment or in our environment that you feel influenced that the most.
What sort of drills have you used or positional.
Starts have you used that probably are most successful from a field sport athlete, You think, yeah, I quite like a couple of.
Things I've been using recently, as like a disadvantage start, which is used quite common commonly in sort of acceleration type sessions, like for example, from a kneeling position or a push up position. I kind of like pairing that
up with something like a dow acceleration. Why I like that is because taking the arms away from me the arms kind of counterbalance what's happening at the legs, and if you take that away, the athletes have to work much much harder to kind of use their legs like pistons to kind of apply force to the floor really
really quickly. So I kind of like putting different drills together that really harness on the way an athlete should feel when they're accelerating, rather than necessarily saying this particular drill will make you faster. That's not how I kind
of think about it. I kind of think about it in the sense that if I give an athlete a drill, or two drills, or three drills, how can I put those three different drills together so that they take one piece from each drill about how I want them to feel during a certain exercise or drill, And then can they put all those different elements together when I'm asking them to execute in an acceleration a pure acceleration type event, for example, like a disadvantage start or a push up start,
or a falling start, or just a three point start or two point start. So that's how I kind of like to coach acceleration in particular. Some stuff that I think has been working really really well with the athletes, particularly at Athletes Authority. Lately in that off season we've been able to really hammer away at it because we don't have that kind of pressures of long, long weeks and high training and running loads whilst they're doing their pre season. So I think it's been pretty cool.
Yeah, and then Toby, obviously the environment you're in. We had a good chat about this last week. Speed is great, but how the hell do you apply it into some massive group settings, in particular a pathways program where you've got, you know, also hundreds some clubs, thousands of kids, especially like an American college setup.
The hell are you influencing things like this?
Yeah, that's a great question and probably something probably something that I'm not going to stand here and say have all the answers to it. Wouldn't say well, I'm going to stand up certain if you keep coming at me, Yeah, leagues yourself, man. I think I think for me, it's it's probably having a look and similar to what Bird was saying, they're probably not trying to think of like, all right, how are we going to get all of
these athletes you know amazingly quicker? Like that's not going to happen in a pre season, particularly when you're teaching so many athletes.
What I'm looking for is.
When we're doing anything within this speed, and we will start with a technical block I'm going to call it. But what we do is choose a couple of very very simple drills that we would like to do that are going to resemble the positions that I would like to hit during our sort of accelerations or maximum velocity running. And so we're not trying to hammer them and do you know sixty four different drills and challenge them massively.
I want to stay consistent. So we picked a few different key exercises, which is going to look at our sort of hip block position, We're going to have a look at a cycle position, and then we've got some for projection and that's it, and we've kept them consistent.
With the kids.
So literally, our technical component is sort of three or four drills which they will repeat each week, and we've split them up into so with our squad, we always get them in sort of three to four groups, so we only are dealing with ten to fifteen athletes at a time, and that's the big thing. We run a carousel style drill base, so the coaches will have them when they come to me for speed or to our
conditioning coaches. With the other programs we only have ten to fifteen athletes, we'll pick those four drills that we think are going to influence the key positions that we want.
We work hard on those.
And then we try to encourage those athletes to then practice or think about those positions when we then let them run fast. Now, it'd be silly to think that off a couple of you know, exposures, are we going to change massively what their technique looks like in those longer, longer accelerations and max Lossit.
No.
But the theory behind that is if we keep consistent and keep the similar queuing and motor patterns going, that hopefully over the course of the preseason we can start to influence some of those key positions that are going to make us more efficient runners like bird set. So for me, that's where we do. We keep it really
quite simple. And then the other part, you know we spoke about exposing them to speed, it's actually letting them and you know we've built up over the four weeks to start off within the preseason, but starting to let them run fast and feel what that feels like. You know,
it is taxing. It's difficult to run fast. So getting them to do that over the sort of built up period of time and just allowing them to run fast, they're going to naturally start to pick and choose and feel better with what we're doing with them.
Do you feel it's appropriate for you to get them to do that when you don't know what it feels like to run fast?
Is it a bit about needing to practice what you preach?
Yeah, I don't know.
If you came down to Gore Hill, we might get Samsy's opinion on this. When LOCKX and I were doing some speed efforts and I was absolutely blowing him out of the water.
So is that staff race still eyes?
I think it should. I definitely think it should be.
I keep putting my money where my mouth is every time, and everyone gets too scared to stand up, and I don't admit it. I reckon maybe someone here could beat me, but no one's gutsy enough to jump on.
So Georgie, probably what do you say, Tommy? Two people that say to you, for example, I only get fifteen minutes with athletes in for example, one or two warm ups inverted commas a week and I'm not going to make a change in that in terms of speed or acceleration because it's so little time that why should I bother chasing a skips or so on and so forth in that little amount of time? Like, what's your answer to that? Because it's something that I come across a lot,
and I know where I stand with that. I think it's important to kind of microdose and all that kind of stuff or what's your take on that kind of question or whatever?
Yeah, I reckon two parts to that.
Firstly, I think really really importantly is having a discussion with your coaching staff and trying to get them to see the value in speed. I think if a program doesn't value speed or doesn't put the time and effort into it, you get out what you put in. So like, ultimately, if a coach is only going to give you ten minutes, right, I'd be lying. If I said, oh, you can still do amazing work and you're going to get all your athletes.
Heaps faster, it's not going to happen.
But I would then argue or look at what is the minimum effective dose so we don't go backwards? Probably in if you have that ten to fifteen minutes in terms of the technical drilling, if I only had ten or fifteen minutes once a week, I would actually probably remove the technical drilling from that component, and I would look at the gym session and where I could start to hit similar position and strengthen the athlete in key
positions in the gym. I would then utilize that ten to fifteen minutes for actually running fast, and that would be how I would go if I only had ten or fifteen minutes. Luckily, I think, and the biggest sort of message I can say to coaches out there is if you think it's important and you value it. Something I got told very young is the moments that matter
happen at speed. So speed is what matters. And I think if you look at all sports, right, or team based sports that we're talking about largely here, all of the important moments in the game or the game breaking
moments happen at speed. If you show to that to a coach, no coach has ever said to you, oh shit, slow down, you made them too fast, right, No one's ever said that, right, So I think if we can communicate that effectively to the coaches, why it's important have examples of how speed has helped your team or what
that will influence. I think you can get them on side, but if ultimately you can't get them on side, then I think think save the ten to fifteen minutes for running fast and look at in the gym what can we do to influence key positions.
Also, I mean that's worked quite well historically and I've seen work well as well as being involved in it is speed doesn't necessarily need to be done with the team, and it'd be handy if everyone got to be quicker. But there's some positions in a lot of sports that really doesn't need to be much more speedier. I if we're talking NRL, a big forward, if they don't get quicker.
It's probably not the end of the world. Be great, but not the end of the world.
Wingers, centers, fullbacks obviously absolute game changes. So when you're working, especially in a professional setting where you have positional coaches, you have grouping of coaches that will work with specific wingers orthoughll in AFL, there's a midfield coach, a back coach, whatever. There will be a lot of moments in training where
they will break and do positional work. So there's no reason why you as an SEC coach if you can't get the time I'm in the prep warm up within training that you can't start to expose the positional coach to saying, because I can guarantee you if you're a midfield coach in the AFL, you want your boys faster or your girls faster. So what can you do where there might be some skill element, but you can open
them up to expose them to max velocity. I think probably too many SMC coaches get embreded in this like, oh, it's got to be a conditioning block, that's my time. I'm in the gym working with coaches to find opportunities to mold this type of speed exposure into positional training is game changing. I probably don't see it enough, but I've seen it work really well when it's done well.
Yeah, I agree one hundred percent.
And looking probably the key demands of what those positions do exactly as you said.
You know, for your middles.
In rugby league, a lot of their work is accelerative work, So trying to do some more resisted acceleration work or stuff like that where we can and that can be done during the gym session, right, Like that kind of stuff can be utilized in a gym session where you could do a five or ten meter resistant accel and that is going to influence what they do on the field massively. But as you said, then if you've got the wingers or fullbacks, you know it can be as
simple as doing like their big sweeping pendulum shape. If we have something similar where we can involve a skills coach but get them to get through at speed and accelerate and open up on those big C runs or J lines as we'd probably call them, then you tick him sort of both boxes, which I think then coaches, you're not taken away from their time, but you're also showing how you can influence and.
Add value there exactly.
And I think, as a bit of a segue to our next point that I wanted to cover off, I had a great coach back at the Giants, Mark Chocko Williams.
For those that are in AFL probably know him.
He is the type of guy that he's never wrong, but he doesn't always say it in the best way, and he used to have a pretty strong philosophy that he used to preach every time we used to do speed stuff as he walked past and would abuse us about doing speed stuff. Is the fastest an AFL player ever is when they're draft, because that's when they're fast. They're light when they're in the AFL. I've never seen anyone get faster. All you guys try to show these
speed results and anything, but they never get faster. The fastest they ever ass when they join. Now, as an overarching premise, probably not accurate, but as a anecdotal and probably raw account of team sport athletes, he's probably not wrong. And funnily enough, Nathan Keeley actually threw up on his
Instagram this exact comment around this speed momentum concept. And it's something that I've always really pushed with coaches that and players to be honest that if I'm putting eight kilos on you over three or four years, if you come to us in your top speed's nine point five meters a second, your best instantaneous speed, and then we put nine kilos on you and you still have that speed, have we gotten you faster or have we increased your ability to move the mass that you currently have that
speed momentum increase.
I don't want to completely.
Agree with Jock, But to be honest, it's hard because when you see in a team environment, like we just said, often we don't have huge amounts of time to create these absolute speed beast. If they're not arriving to us fast already, then it's very hard to make them faster. Can we make them more resilient to their speeds? I certainly think so. Can we maintain their instantaneous velocities we add mass, in which case we've made a big difference.
I definitely think we can.
The question I have for you is do you think in a team environment Let's use Australian sport because we're probably the most and net with that, we know it. They get drafted into NRL AFL in the soccer world, they start there.
How much faster do you actually make someone?
I think in the soccer world, I think you really can, because I think it's something that's really really neglected. I was having this conversation with someone the other day and talking about what their preseason looked like and how they felt. And we've actually got an athlete here that Wedden did a half marathon with no training. So he's a pretty fit guy and he did it in a relatively decent time, and I sort of asked him, you know, what was
your preseason like? And his preseasons typically looked like, well, I did a six k run and then I did some interval running, and long story short, a lot of running, a lot of junk running. Since he's come here, we kind of flipped that on its head and focused on strength, speed exposure with us a couple of times a week, working more explosively with some of his lists. His kind of movement jumps gone up six centimeters, his RSI has gone up fifty centimeters.
So can I make that guy faster?
And can that have a positive impact on his ability on the field as a soccer player?
Absolutely.
I think it's something that football is massively, massively behind AFL rugby, rugby union. I think the paradigm is that we have as a soccer player, we have a running sport. So let's run around, let's jog around, and so let's do endless fitness, endless conditioning, And all we've really done is made made our players more tired before the season even arrives. Have we put them in positions whether they're exposed to higher forces and high velocities, in their sprinting.
Have we increased their strength, increased how explosive they are with a typical preseason Probably not so obviously unbiased with the whole soccer thing, but I think can we make soccer players better faster? Yes, because where it's such a low hanging fruit already. In general, I think are we always making athletes faster? Not overall, I think we're creating better shapes, maybe helping them interact with the ground a
little bit better. And maybe their top speed before was thirty thirty kilometers an hour for argument's sake, and the top speed is still around that mark, but now they can hit that much more efficiently, so I think they're getting to that mark a lot easier. So I think that's also has a really positive flow on effect to their actual sport. Whether we increase that actual top number or not, I think it's it's still really valuable.
Going back to the probably the positional chat there as well. Lock you and I have had this chat before, but around protecting someone's superpower, and I think you know, if you players are going to come into a team or are selected in a team for a specific reason, right, and so you know if they've been selected because they're fast right well as a strength and conditioning coach or as.
A team you know, coaches included in that.
But we want to make sure they stay fast, right because otherwise they lose that superpower for why they were recruited. Now, of course along the way, we want to eliminate or reduce some of their deficits, but not at the detriment of taking away their superpower.
So if we had.
Someone I'll use rugby league as an example that's playing on the on the wing or in the centers who is very very good on their feet, very quick, you know, an elusive right, and then we go and put team on him. Are they still going to be as good as what they were before we put that weight on them? So by doing that, yeah, they might be better in the contact, but now they're just like any other player that's pretty.
Good on their feet.
And yeah they might be a little bit better in the contact, but before they were a weapon on their feet.
So have we made them better? Have we just molded them to something else?
So I think identifying what people are brought in for on the contrary or the flip side, your big power. You know, middles that need to withstand lots of contact, so or use big junior Paulo that you had there right, Like, yes, we want to make him a little bit more explosive as we spoke about. But if we strip nine or ten KOs because we get another you know, half a kilometer or a kilometer of max velocity, we've probably not made him a better football player.
Yeah, probably taken away super bad.
Well, that speed momentum changes, doesn't Like now he's he's very marginally quicker, but he's now not having nine kilos of mass behind him when maybe he was one hundred and thirty comes down one hundred and fifteen.
Which I've seen those changes in big forwards.
And now you've got one hundred and thirty kilo blokes running at you, and now you're only one hundred and fifteen. Like, I don't get how strong you are. Sometimes physics wins out and it is And I've always said that like a homogeneous group is not a team. Like a team is designed to have specially it's a group of specialists that come together.
You've got to have your fast players, you've got to have.
Your big players, tall, strong, whatever it might be, it's got to be positionally demanding, and you've got to set it for that.
And I've seen it plenty of times.
In one particular reason, we had a winger that we just had so many hamstring injuries. Super fast, super fast, but you see it even in the developmental stage where he's already fast, so we don't need to do speed work with him. What needs to happen he needs to do extra weights. And what is a majority of extra weights upper body? So you get these over developed upper bodies on these skinny legs that are fast and tenderness, and you just get all these hammis because what are
they do in the game. They go back to their strength, which is running fast. But in training you know they try and get exposed to it, but they're never doing the full max velocity work because they're always doing extra weights or something like that, because they don't need more speed work they're already fast. Any spot on, I think when it's the old adage.
Of sharpening the sword is exactly what you need to do with them.
You need to bring weaknesses up where you can, but I personally feel that you also need to really focus on their strengths because you need to maintain it, especially as they get older, because that becomes even.
More their superpower.
Where in a general overview, there's always going to be athletes that coming to teams that you can make fast. I do believe that, but I think as a whole often what a general approach is going to be is you're going to recruit someone who's fast, you want to make sure that they get exposed to speed as much as possible, and positions to help them be resilient to their speed. Sometimes their own strength can be the thing
that damages them. All you need to then do is make sure one they can perform like that on game day two, they can repeat it on game day and in the fourth quarter the last ten minutes they're still hitting those max velocities. That's a huge win in itself. And finally they can do that for as long as
they get in their career. So it doesn't mean that they start to die at twenty five twenty six because they're starting to lose their spark because they're being either having too much body mass put on them, they're training demands a way too volume driven where they're just starting to fatigue and they're not be able to tolerate it.
That at twenty nine point thirty, their specialty is still their specialty because unfortunately, and we see it all the time, the ones that have a key specialty of speed are usually the ones that lose their spark the earliest. The grinding, tough, kind of just you know, homogeneous, white bloke that is kind of average at everything is the one that probably lasts the longest because there's not the same decriment as they get older, you're just absolute ferrari that's lightning quick.
Are usually the ones that you see fall off the cliff quite quickly as they get older if they're not done properly. And to be honest, it is very hard to maintain that type of speed up until your thirties.
If you're doing it, you're doing a bloody good job.
And I think with that as well, and something that is obvious but we probably haven't touched on. You know, you talk about track and how we're building towards a single event. You know, they will run fast, or need to require to run fast in competition once every couple of months, or in major competitions, it might be once every couple of weeks. At lesser competitions, but they often
won't put out their mac speed. What you spoke about there before Locke as well, is in season, we will require these guys to be able to produce high intensity
or maximal efforts every single week. But also then throw in that, you know, if you call it junk running or volume underneath it that an effort in And that's why even when we do speed training at the start of training, and that's probably another topic in itself, where you do speed exposure at the start of training when athletes are fresh, yet often in the seventy fifth minute or this the eightieth minute of a game, athletes are going to have to produce a maximal velocity or maximal effort.
So are we doing them an injustice? Yes, it's probably safer. But are we doing them in justice by not having speed exposure or training.
At the end of sessions?
Yeah as well, And to be honest, it probably highlights that the vast difference when we talk about sport specific speed because like a team sport athlete doesn't need three weeks to recover from one hundred meters sprint that they do a training.
But yeah, I can.
Guarantee you right now, all those Olympians that ran in the final, they took a long time recover. Its only one hundred meters, but the speeds at which they read are so close to their maximum ability humanly possible.
It takes a lot to recover.
Yeah, you look at multiple Well, ye had the little comment for people at home.
He sort of warmed up for a bit of a comment there. What was it, mate, I was.
Just going to say, is that why you take four weeks off every time?
It is?
Mate?
When I beat people like you, I got to celebrate that. I blame the kids for the kids of that.
But you know, when you look at the demand of say a pure track sprinter, is not just that one effort. It's the heats, the semis, the final Some of them back up in a two hundred the next day. So some of those competitions where they're running it, where they are like the recovery profile is very different to a team sport athlete. But nonetheless it's they're all demanding regardless of what you're doing.
Sorry, go on, how would you incorporate something like you mentioned before, Like you were talking about doing sort of max exposures or close to max exposures, perhaps towards the end of training, when there is a kind of element of fatigue. How would you kind of incorporate that. Is that something that you think about incorporating like a lot. Is it something that you kind of microcycle every couple of weeks, or.
Like, how would you kind of incorporate something like that?
Yeah, I would.
I would probably differentiate between having speed exposure at the back end of training and then full out max velocity let's crack the whips. We do a lot of and getting further down the preseason, probably not as much right this second, but we do a lot of you know, live game or live play in training, whether that's thirteen on thirteen in rugby egg or small sided games where they are going to get far similar to game profile stuff,
and that's at the back end of training. Often you'll do your you know, your small technical stuff and that's both from a coaching standpoint as well as the speeds at the start. But then you let the boys roll into They might do you know, two ten minute blocks or two fifteen minute blocks of opposed live play, and so in that you allow essentially the live play to unfold. We don't pull things back unless you're in a period of unloading, but you know, general speaking, we'll let them
run fast. If they make a line break, let them play through. If they need to do a recovery chase like, let them do that. So we are getting exposure to that sort of profile or style of.
Running at training at the back end.
Then have played around with a little bit of I'm going to say, repeat speed, but it's not maximum velocity but holding tempo speed and stuff that we have done at the back end of training before, which just seem to work really well where you kind of do like, you know, we might set it up so they have a sort of ten minute meter lead in, then a hold for twenty meters, then ten meter drop off, and they then turn around and repeat that back the other way,
and we might do eight to ten efforts of something like that where they're trying to get themselves up and hold. And we haven't played around with that at the end of training in seasons before, and that seemed to work quite well. Are they running one hundred percent maximally, No, But are we getting some sort of exposure to what I'm going to define as high speed running. Yes, But I think that live game sim stuff really is where you can get a lot of exposure in game like
situations which is going to best resemble. It's not going to be exact, but best resemble game day.
It's very hard to set a structured speed session at the end of a of a full training session. I've always liked the practically set up a small side of game, or even if you want to call it a larger side of game, to be able to expose them. You've just got to a little bit more accountable then because people can hide. And before we wrap it up, because we've got five more bits or so left, I wanted to touch base on court based sports. We've obviously had
a lot of field chat. It's very easy to show when athletes hit max velocity in field based.
Sports, we can see it's very obvious.
Court based sports they do not, they do not have the space to be able to do it. But we still Again, some people argue there's no point. Other people argue there's a lot of point. Burge will start with you, mate, what's your opinion around court sport athletes that for a major part of their game their ax selling d selling without ever reaching that max velocity.
Do you believe in max velocity work for them?
If so, why, how does it bleed into it or do you just say not screw it with focus on acceleration.
No, I think it can be really really powerful. I think the way I think about it is the same sort of way of really really heavy lifting. At some point in the gym, you know, we're exposing the body to really really high forces, asking the nervous system to recruit a really heavy high amount of sort of muscle
fibers and all that kind of stuff. So I think from a standpoint of let's expose these athletes to the highest forces we possibly can, and that everything under that should be in theory, much much more tolerable on the body. So from a max velocity standpoint, obviously, Hami's going to go through a lot of demand as we kind of build into that acceleration phase. Kalf going through a hell
of a lot of demand. So from my standpoint, if we can get the body used to kind of those forces and used to those sort of high forces and high demands, then everything as a result that is under that then should be really really tolerable, so as well as being able to kind of reproduce it, because it doesn't cost you so much to kind of produce those efforts. So I think it can be really really valuable. I think it's just about where you put it. Perhaps within
say a court athlete season. Are you doing it all the time in the middle of the season when they're playing two games a season, maybe not. Are you doing it in an off season block where they can really hone in on some of these physical attributes. Yeah, one hundred percent beautiful, Tommy.
Yeah.
I think the last point there that Bird said is really important, and that's probably where my head goes, not having worked specifically like in a team environment, in a
court setting. But I think for me, when I think about it, I don't mind the idea of exposing them to max velocity and agree with what Burgers said there, but I think it's really important where we put that, And so I think in the season or in a pre season where we can, in that more general prep phase expose them to lots of different things, which is
going to make them better generally. But I would be probably mindful that in season, when you know there is significant demands you to recover when you're playing on a hard surface rather than grass, you know, ankles, knees hips, from that game, to then open them up in a max velocity I think I would be mindful in season, but I think the accelerative work or lots of acceleration based stuff probably needs to be filtered the whole way through because we need to keep a consistent load of that.
And I think that that's something you know massively if you're looking at GPS numbers and what you're looking at from an indoor setting is that how many accelerations they've done in a session and d cells because of the obviously the ecentric demand there and how taxing that is, I think you've got to keep that theme through, So that would be the idea. But actual maximal velocity exposure I think general prep phase and then maybe touching it
occasionally when you've got longer turnarounds. But it wouldn't be something for me that every week I would feel like I need these you know, these athletes to run super fast. But obviously Lock, you're the only one here that's worked in ten sports.
Would be good to hear what you think.
I think the court based acceleration is obviously the key component of things like netball and basketball. I massively value high velocity running or max velocity running, but I think for me, the part that I value is the intent
of accelerating to max velocity is very different. You have ten meters and you say we're going to accelerate for ten meters and then you pull up the way they accelerate, the intensity, the force output that they use for that acceleration is very different compared to when you were saying we're going for forty meters and you're accelerating up to
max velocity. Because again, for people out there that have sprinted or work with sprinters, like you know, if you do short what sprints, whether consciously or unconsciously, they do it, it's a different intent. They know they've only got ten meters, they know that we got fifteen whatever it might be, And as much as they think they're really pushing it, it's very different to that when you compare it to actually, Okay, I'm accelerating up to a max velocity here and then
I'm trying to hold. I think the force dynamics, the impulse change that you get with that intent is very different and very valuable. And then I think that bleeds across into those shorter, sharper accelerations and d cells that
we start to see. So I'm a massive fan of a bit your spot on like the appropriate time to do it, because also then just practical like to do it, especially in say, you know the setting that I've previously been with netball, like there's nowhere in the facility that we can do it, so we need to go elsewhere.
And for those who worked with hard court sport athletes where they're on hard services, it's the inverse of say a turf based sport where they feel better on hard service when you take make them onto soft surfaces, then they pull up with calf sowness, all this type of stuff because suddenly this sponge your surface means they don't have the same stiffness across joints, the same tenderness response, and they actually find it harder versus say a team
sport athlete in in field and stuff like that, where you put their mind if it's been raining and you know we had it in the AFL when it's pissing down with rain and something gets shut or you have to go indoors because you just can't execute the skills you need. You've got your list of players that just can't train on a court because their shins pull up too sore, their their tendon's pull up too sore, so at the end of the day, you get used to what you play on.
But I think I think.
Max velocity for court sport is almost I don't know, I might be shot for saying this, but.
It's like general physical prep. It fits into that component.
It may not be highly specific to the sport, but I think the general prep of it bleeds into the specifics of any court sports very effectively. Awesome team, love it, Thank you for chatting. Hopefully there was a few takeaways for people at home. But we'll see if we can get Bergs back on for a part two and maybe we talk about some change of direction specifics.
But it's been fun. Thank you Tommy, Thank you Burge.
We'll speak souving me no.
Thanks for having us on. Burge were done on the debut Mate Kick five on de