A Richo AFL Pre-Season Program

Richo · 12-21-2005, 01:32 AM

Pre-Season is the time to train for your sport. Whether it is NFL, AFL, Rugby, Soccer, Water Polo, Wrestling, Baseball or any other sport, you train to improve your fitness, speed, strength and endurance in the off-season. And use the season to maintain it.

This program designed by yours truly is for Aussie Rules players to follow, or have reference to in their pre-season training regime.

It focuses on the important aspects of AFL, the endurance, speed and strength. And each section will be covered in detail in separate articles. The first article is improving your endurance for football.

---------Endurance---------

I don’t know the exact numbers, but on average, an AFL ruck-rover/rover runs about 5-6km a game. Now you need to be fit to do that. Your position in AFL also addresses your fitness training, for someone who is a on-baller, they would need to be fitter than say a forward pocket. However, many coachers/trainers train the endurance part by making them run continuous laps. Now not every team trains like this, but many do. And it’s a very ineffective way to train.

For those who have watched an AFL game, you notice that there is no one position that they run at the same speed all game long. There is continuous speed changing, directional changing and so forth. There is times where you jog around the field when the ball is not near you to stay warm and active. There is times where to break away to make a lead, or chase a tackle. There is times where you have the ball and make a break with a run. And there is also times where you just plain walk around waiting for some action. So in order to address all these situations, we need not to do the classical “Give me 20 laps”, we need to adopt a more modern style of training.

*** Modern Day Fitness in Football ***

“Give me 20 laps!!” the coach yells out to the players after a terrible exercise. The players all look at each other in a slump, and unwilling start there 20 lap journey. After about four laps a new member of the team stopped running at his continuous, normal pace. The coach came over to him

“Johnny, what do you think you’re doing?” The coach screams in disbelief “You need to run them 20 laps, you are new to the team and prove your worthiness. Plus, you will thank me because you will get fitter”

“No!!” Johnny replies with “It’s a stupid, out-dated way to train your fitness”

“I don’t care what you say. What do you know, now give me an extra five laps” The coach orders. As Johnny runs his 25 laps, he keeps his same old pace. Then came game day, and Johnny, and the rest of the team were tired after the first quarter….

“What are you all doing?!” The coach screams once again, “You are all tired, how come?! We did 20 laps at training, you all should be fit!!” then Johnny stands up…

“Coach, you didn’t train us properly. Name one time when we ran the same pace during the first quarter?” The coach looks at Johnny with a blank look “Yes, as I thought. The reason we can’t keep up with them is because we can’t handle the changing paces. Maybe we should of trained more football related hey coach?”

At the end of the game, the team ended up losing by about 12 goals, and all players unable to walk.

If this story ever sounds familiar to you, don’t worry, we all have been there. Our coaches make us run lap after lap hoping that it can transfer into the game. Well Coach, sorry mate but it doesn’t work that way.

*** Training for Actual Football Endurance ***

So how do we train for a football game based endurance? It’s quite simple, run. But please, whatever you do, don’t give me 20 laps. Instead, on the next page is a list of exercises to improve your football endurance.

Hopefully, it’s easy to follow. All you do is follow the arrows when your running on the field. The key to this exercise however lays within the length of the arrows. If the arrows are long, eg, centre-half back to full-forward, you run at a normal jog speed. If the arrows are medium length, you run half-way between normal jog and flat-out speed, eg, back-pocket to back-flank. If the arrows are short, eg, wing to centre, you run at full pace.

Now you are probably thinking that this will only increase speed, the trick here is that you don’t get to rest, it has been designed to be a continuous loop.

However, to add variety, make endurance gains etc, don’t be afraid to change the speed of the arrow lengths around. For example, instead of long arrows being normal jog, don’t be threaten to make them into flat-out sprints. Not only will your speed work benefit, but also your cardiovascular endurance.

Perform this workout for a min of 20mins and a max of 35mins. And if it’s your endurance that is lagging, do this workout 3-4 times a week. If your fitness is fairly conditioned, only 2-3 times a week is needed.

Also, don’t forget to take a beep test at the start of your pre-season and at the start of the season see whether you have improved. Also, as time goes on, and you get fitter, increase speeds, instenstiy and such. To mix things up on the endurance, go for a bike ride using the same principle of changing speeds, and also swimming, changing speeds. And my personal favorite, go down you’re your local swimming pool and go to the shallow end where the water reaches about waist to chest level, and do runs and sprints in the water. The added resistance will do wonders. And also, one last item, if you start experiencing pain or discomforts, STOP. And if you need a rest, like, really need a rest. STOP and rest.

This is Richo signing out of his first article for IronMass.com I hope I have helped some AFL players increase their fitness.

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