Two Coaches & a Coffee
With nearly 60years of professional experience between them across the world in Premier League, International Rugby, AFL and consulting in a plethora of other sports and industries; two old bulls of the performance, injury prevention, and rehabilitation world: Darren Burgess and Jason Weber catch up over a brew and discuss all things Sports Performance.
Two Coaches & a Coffee
Season 2, Episode 11
Dive into the world of athletic excellence with Darren and I as we dissect the nuanced science of periodization in athletic training. We discuss the dynamic interplay between competitive sports schedules and strategic training adaptations. We'll uncover how the preordained sports calendar can both facilitate and hinder an athlete's journey to peak performance, especially in the grueling run-up to an AFL season. Darren's firsthand experiences bring to light the tough decisions surrounding de-load weeks, and the tension between textbook theories and the tailored tweaks that are essential for elevating an athlete to their fullest potential.
The Achilles issues around the NFL are still on our radar, putting the spotlight on the delicate balance between an athlete's fervor for competition and their imperative need for recovery. This narrative sets the stage for a broader conversation about the ethical crossroads faced by sports professionals when injury management collides with the relentless drive for victory. As we pivot to the NFL draft, Darren's PhD research on draft prediction accuracy takes center stage, examining how in-game performance metrics can vastly enhance the foresight into an athlete's professional trajectory. Expect to be captivated as we scrutinize the draft's entertainment value, the ethical quandaries in high-stakes scenarios, and the lasting impact these decisions have on the athletes we admire.
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G'day and welcome to Two Coaches and a Coffee. I'm Jason Webber and Darren Burgess alongside me, albeit in a state that borders where I am at present. How are you, mate?
Darren Burgess:Yeah, good, and that sounds close, but it would take me about 27 hours to drive to you.
Jason Weber:Yeah, it is. It's unnerving how big our country is and it's funny not funny, but interesting that you still look at the States as well, and the States is about geographically similar landmass to australia, but when you go, it's not until you go there and you try and move from state to state. You try it like I was visiting other universities and teams and whatever.
Jason Weber:it takes such a long time to get anywhere yeah and it's the same here, like man, where wa is the most isolated capital city in the world. Um, and it would take, would it take me three hours to fly, two and a half hours to fly to Adelaide? So yeah, man, we're a fair way away. Coffee would be well and truly cold by the time we got there.
Darren Burgess:Or I'd need another one. Exactly One or the other Exactly.
Jason Weber:I'm already out. I just went through another batch. I could probably go another one.
Darren Burgess:Five o'clock in the afternoon, so if I had a coffee I'd be in trouble. But um, what were we going to talk about? One thing I was going to ask you about is is is periodization. When I went through university, at university new south wales, just way back, when you know the tutor bumper periodization assignment that I had to do for Paul Batman in exercise science 1.
Jason Weber:Shout out to Paul Batman.
Darren Burgess:Yeah, yeah, I thought it was the greatest trick to periodize all of the aspects of training and performance and to put it all on one annual plan. I thought it was amazing and it introduced me to Excel, which has been a love-hate relationship ever since. But what strikes me as interesting is that I don't use a lot of it. Now you know you could argue you use a form of periodisation, which you do, but essentially the periodisation is based on when are we playing and work backwards, and that is your periodization, and if you're in the end, it's everything.
Jason Weber:What about preseason, mate? You've just come through your 472nd preseason with AFL and, like it's 15 weeks of go, go, go, you're not playing Now.
Darren Burgess:It's 15 weeks of go, go, go, you're not playing.
Jason Weber:Now, what's the difference? So where do you see periodisation fitting in there?
Darren Burgess:Yes and no. Yes, you do. So I shouldn't say I don't use it anymore. But now the AFL has three weeks pre-Christmas, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're not good enough to play in the finals which my team hasn't been the last couple of years then two weeks till they have five days off, then another three weeks till you start playing games and then you play trial games, which in every club around the country is. These are massively important games, even though they're trial games, but they're massively important. We want to get confidence, we want to sell memberships, we want to do all that sort of stuff.
Darren Burgess:Yeah yeah, yeah, no correlation between trial game success and season success, but you cannot tell anybody that at that moment, and so then you've got to go. Okay, we're playing a game, so we better back off. So of course there is some pre-season periodisation, but nowhere near as much as what the commentary or the you would think. Or the education, or the education, or the education that we were offered and I read reams of books that I had to order from the US way back on it. So your take on it.
Jason Weber:Well, mate, I think you're absolutely right. I think we're so often these days bound by logistics. The calendar is set Like they're telling you and, interestingly, this is how this subject sort of came up a bit and I'll share my view on it as we go along. So I did a review. I was asked to review a unionisation plan for a college football team just in the last week. So I've done that, had a look, and it was Tudor Bomper-like, the way it was set out, right. And for anyone who doesn't know, in case you're unaware, tudor Bomper is like the father of periodisation. He put everything in boxes and there was some research to it, I don't know how much. But then, subsequent to that, I've, you know, you read certainly a lot of the Russian and European texts Vladimir Zatsiosky, volodymyr Shansky, a lot of the stuff of the Russian stuff.
Jason Weber:Lifting was very periodized but very Olympic, right, so you don't have competitions for a period, anyway. So I saw this plan and I went into exactly the same mode as you're going, like, well, okay, what are the logistics here? When? When can we train? When can't we train? When's the opportunity? But the thing that struck me the most was those core sort of values that you hark back to. What's your cycle like? Is it two on one down, three on one down four? Is it two on one down, three on one down, four on one down, five on one down whatever? I'm not arguing for one or another, but what is it? And then you look at things like you know. Zetsi Orskill talk a lot about the rule of 60, so that your deload week should be 60% of the load of your heaviest in the preceding phase. Now I mucked around with that in the AFL for years. I never got to 60%, never, never had a coach allowed to go that low.
Darren Burgess:Yeah, okay.
Jason Weber:But I certainly saw if we could breach, if we could get under 20%, like if we could drop by 20% to 25%. I saw massive health benefits.
Jason Weber:I saw players not breaking down the colds and flus on long periods. But if I hark back to the program I looked at, one of the observations I made was well, there's periods where there's just build in load for like six weeks, and so my question to that is should you be looking at that and saying, hey, is this two three-week blocks, or can I really keep them going for six weeks?
Darren Burgess:So it could not depend on the group that you have.
Jason Weber:Could do, could do and it could depend on where you start. So I'm not saying anyone's right or wrong, but I think there's got to be and I look forward. I'm going to have the discussion with the team involved later, but I think you've got to be in a position to say well, validate, can we keep going? Is there a way to keep going? Six weeks, six-week builds, you know, depending on where the athlete's at and the not the issue, but the observation I made in this program was that their highest, their highest block of work didn't come until their camp that preceded them playing. So they're building up. There was no, there was no kind of peak in training and then, okay, let's hold for a bit, stabilize, let the body adapt, body adapt to it, and then we'll go. It was like we're here and now we're playing.
Jason Weber:So if I go back, my opinion is that I think there are elements of periodization that we should understand and utilize, but you're going to have to manipulate them based on what you've got. If you've got a really young team right, you're going to struggle to hold load early. You might need to give more time and I will say I've used with older players, particularly in rugby union, the great George Gregan. We used to run a three-week cycle two weeks load, one week down. Two weeks load, one week down because particularly with his lifting he only needed two weeks and he could drop down and maintain no problem, equally. You know, you could keep him fresh going in and I still think at times we send players into games completely overdone.
Darren Burgess:Yeah, that's the interesting one for me and maybe it's a conversation because we've got a few other things to get through a conversation for another day that match day minus and I reckon because I've done what number did you say? 1420?
Darren Burgess:472 472 pre-seasons. That means I've done about the same in-seasons and, yeah, or I've supervised people who have been doing those in-season and the different models. I could give you eight different models that have won the last eight premierships in the AFL or the last eight Premier Leagues, and everyone's going with a different model. So anybody who comes to this model works, and this is the only problem you can do is I'll say I'll make an interesting observation of last year's AFL.
Jason Weber:I know of a team that ran a certain program. They ran a two-day, like two heavy training days up until the vice or the first half of the season. Then the second half of the season they made a choice to drop down to three to one and had one heavy day in a week and they the second, they back half. Uh, use swimming parlance, they reverse split, they negative split. You know they. They went really well. They flew the second half of the season.
Jason Weber:Yeah okay so there's no question, mate, there are. There's no one model. But what I think there should be, and my opinion is that if we you've got to put something to paper, you've got to be saying, well, like, if you go to a coach and you're not giving them parameters, we're going to be lost. That would be my opinion. So those, you get something to paper. But there should be some semblance of biological adaptation. Where are we taking them up? When are we bringing them down? When are we doing? Is everything happening at once? So are we going volume aerobic, volume, speed, volume lifting all at once or are we mixing it up? So I think a periodization. I remember, with a very unique coach in Australia in AFL, sat down when I first met him and he said what's your opinion on periodization? I just gave him a general idea. He said well, I think it's all shit. But the reason I think they think it's all shit because it's a plan of some nature and when there's a plan of some nature and when there's a plan they're constrained.
Jason Weber:I learned off a great old bull, kelvin Giles, great old bull of strength and conditioning, british track and field, broncos Rugby League in Australia, famous for that. He used to say write your plan in pencil and just make sure the most important people have their races yeah because you're gonna have to change. But you've got to have something. You've got to have a plan, yeah, and it's at some point some understanding of when things are going to go up and down.
Jason Weber:Yeah, it'll change yeah but I definitely think there should be to go up and down, yeah, it'll change? Yeah, but I definitely think there should be echoes of the past.
Darren Burgess:Yeah for sure. No, there's no doubt there should be that. It is dictated a bit too by games, but when you have the opportunity to push and pull Of course it is.
Jason Weber:The one that sometimes loses me is the old two-to-bumper model where it's the whole team. Well, actually, you might might have, depending on your group, you might have 42 different plans going, because they're all different cats and you manipulate. You're manipulating different things, but I I do think there's. It's like I always say to my son with music, man, you're playing guitar, learn the basics, we learn the chords, then you can go and play all the fancy stuff, but if you don't ever learn the basics, you're kind of out the back door a little bit. Anyway, I got one for you. I got one for you.
Jason Weber:Great, very interesting conversation just in the last couple of hours. The we talked about the achilles thing in the NFL. All year, also the beginning of this year, there's been a couple of blips in the AFL. I've kind of been like a bit of a dog with a bone. I haven't let it go.
Jason Weber:I've been talking to a radiologist, a very good friend of mine, who's published a lot in this area in radiology and medicine in the tendon space, and he's telling me that there's the accuracy that he's getting to at the moment, independent of UTC, because of what they've learned and what he can move with is fantastic and they're doing a lot, getting a lot more positive results. But the cornerstone to that is quick question I asked him was do you think it's plausible that tendons just explode or would we think that there must be a pathology underneath? He said there has to be. There has to be something underneath to make those massive changes. Yes, I think there's going to be the car accident events on a field where the kid gets put in the wrong spot and bang it just goes. So be it. But the guy jumping on the sideline and then taking off in the Super Bowl had to have been something underneath.
Jason Weber:So I'm not saying we have a solution to anything yet, but I think we can't say the jury's out. I think we need to keep looking and I think investigating surfaces and boots and all that is appropriate and necessary investigating surfaces and boots and all that is appropriate and necessary, uh. But I do think looking at how we classify our athletes and how we understand their movement is critical and it's not finished yet. A lot to go yet what do you say?
Darren Burgess:the calf uh, calf pathology well, achilles, achilles, pathology like a tendinopathy yeah, so a tendinopathy, but, um, the detection of that and the assessment of that becomes, um, yeah, the critical factor and how we monitor that and this changes, yeah and Virgil.
Jason Weber:I think this comes back to that thing we always talk about with, uh, what we do here, which is talk hypothetically. We don't know what the athlete was reporting in the four weeks beforehand. Yeah, so I've just a good friend of mine, track and field athlete, just finished at the Australian track and field championships. Didn't go particularly well, but she's been fighting Achilles tendinopathy for quite a number of weeks. She rings me up and we're talking through some stuff and she goes oh yeah, I'm fighting this, this thing. I'm like what do you mean? You're fighting it? Oh, I've been fighting for about six weeks. I can still run, I can still compete. I'm just not very good and I'm like hold on, what, what are you doing? Like you know. So she's doing isometrics, but we come back to that piece of there's performance and so if I'm just putting my hand for people listening, I'm putting my hand arbitrarily in the air, but she's able to continue, but performance has markedly dropped.
Darren Burgess:If the performance has dropped, that's the telltale sign. But there are some people with Achilles presentation of some sort of pain or Achilles pathology, discomfort, but are still able to perform. Oh exactly, hamstring tendon and all that.
Jason Weber:Yeah, oh, absolutely. But I think you've hit the nail on the head If it's symptomatic. When you've got, let's say, particularly in Achilles, you've got large-scale, observable changes, like you've got swelling, like the Achilles is larger on that side, you've got a visible atrophy on, say, the medial gastroc on that side. You've got things there that you should be dealing with. Now we don't know if the 23 Achilles in the NFL had any of those things. There's no data on that. But I think we've got to not beat it up so much that, hey, this is an epidemic. People might be having the discussion exactly like you're saying yes, we've got it. Yes, we know what it is, we've got it, but we've got to go. We've got no choice. You know it's the Super Bowl, I'm going.
Jason Weber:Yeah, but from a practitioner's perspective, for me, like I only we talked about this the other week about reviewing yourself. As much as I'm happily a lunatic entrepreneur at the moment, if I had to step back into a job next week, let's say I step back into the Adelaide Crows, you know, you move on what would I do? What would I do if I was confronted by an Achilles, like I've got to? I pride myself in continuing that practice. So, yeah, I think we've got to keep looking. And what would you do? At what point would you make a change?
Darren Burgess:Yeah, it's a tough one.
Jason Weber:It's very challenging.
Darren Burgess:I can think of a couple of examples where we've managed Achilles tendinopathy or Achilles presentation or pathology for a full season.
Jason Weber:Yeah. And the players, but clearly the kids, they play, but clearly they still played well.
Darren Burgess:Yeah, yeah, they did.
Jason Weber:If you're keeping them on the field and coach is going, what the hell's Steve Gerrard doing? He's not running. Well, he's got to kill his tendinopathy. Well, get him off the field and fix it. That's where it ends up.
Darren Burgess:Okay. Well then we take him off for six, seven weeks, or do you want him to keep playing, because even him at 80% is pretty good.
Jason Weber:He's better than everybody else, and that's then the judgment call, but then that's the judgment call of what performance is exactly like yes, I'll accept steven gerrard at 80, because that's better than everybody else's 100 yeah no brainer, let's go for it.
Jason Weber:But I will say I have seen maybe not players of that magnitude, but certainly brown line medal level in afL not performing and have an issue. And you say, there's the issue, shouldn't play, shouldn't play. And you say it, and you say it over and over again, and then he plays and then something worse happens as the tendon goes kaput and all of a sudden. You know you're the idiot.
Darren Burgess:High performance manager who can't prevent injuries? Yeah, exactly.
Jason Weber:Like you can't do more than say don't play.
Darren Burgess:The risk is too high.
Jason Weber:We should get T-shirts made up Me too.
Darren Burgess:Last one for you. We've got five minutes left.
Jason Weber:Good mate.
Darren Burgess:One of the most exciting days in the sporting calendar for anybody who follows US sports is coming up, and that's the NFL draft. When you were thinking I like about the draft is obviously the theatre of it, and they turn it into a two-day event, which they're trying to do here with the AFL.
Jason Weber:Massive.
Darren Burgess:The thing that I don't like about it being on the inside is the complete ignorance on what data we should be looking at that leads to career success and what data we should be throwing out.
Jason Weber:Well, give us a bit of background, darren, because it's worthwhile people knowing that your PhD research as a younger man with much prettier hair and more of it, and all the rest of it, was exactly in this space. So, man, get on your high horse and give us a quick.
Darren Burgess:I used Will Hopkins and those who know statistics know that Will's a mad scientist and one of the best statisticians. Applied statisticians out there used him and we looked at predicting career success from a the draft. So 10-year career success, we we looked at the 2001 draft and 2002 draft and we looked at, by the time I got around to publishing it, five and ten year career success in 2010 and 2011 how many games career success dictated by how many games did you play? And there's confounders like high draft picks go to crappier teams so they have more of a chance of playing games, and Will accounted for all of that.
Darren Burgess:So for anybody who says yeah, but yeah, but answered a Will not me Mixed effect modelling is what he used, I believe.
Darren Burgess:It was unbelievably complex, so much so we used these Monte Carlo simulations, so much so that we had a computer running for about eight days straight with all the simulations for each simulation anyway, and what we found is that the draft itself was a poor predictor. But when you combine the draft with some metrics that we collected during games when those kids were playing games, and those metrics were around high speed and sprint per minute, the draft was an excellent draft. Plus the games, or metrics during games was that were an excellent predictor of career success, and and by the margin of like 10 games per season, which is half a season worth of success. So those metrics were the agility, the 20-metre time trial here in Australia I know they use 40-yard in the US and weight was important in the positive, and then that, combined with high speed and sprint metres per minute, were excellent career success predictors. But if you took the draft by itself, no matter what combination, and we combined everything over and over again, it was hopeless.
Jason Weber:Yeah, but that's the thing of it, isn't it? Like I was thinking when you spoke earlier, I had a CEO sit me down once and say what's your job? I said, oh, I'm the head of performance. Whatever. He said no, you're in the entertainment business, your job is entertainment. You just got to put bums on seats. That's all that matters, which, when you look at the draft, is what that is. I guarantee that, although you know this, even in our little world of AFL, there's that much other research done on the back end that I feel like the 100 kilo, the 220-pound bench press for as many reps as you can do is really for the crowd and it's tradition. It's a big tradition over there like massive.
Jason Weber:And some of the reps they get out is unbelievable, just insane.
Darren Burgess:What I do find interesting, and some guys still say it. They still say he's a 4.98, 40-yard dasher.
Jason Weber:Well, they've only just started using timing lights. It used to all be hand-timed, so the variability between you and me and the next guy was unbelievable.
Darren Burgess:I listened to the odd NFL podcast and these are people who've been in clubs saying, yeah, we got the official times, but no, no, we took our scouts. Our scouts were timing it on the line. I'm like, oh my goodness.
Jason Weber:Yeah, it's a bit like Moneyball, isn't it that scene in Moneyball where Brad Pitt's sitting there and going like what are you guys doing the scouts? And they go. Well, he dances well on a night out and he talks to good-looking girls, so he must be good.
Darren Burgess:Yeah.
Jason Weber:You know that's all the skill. But you would think in this day and age, particularly in the NFL with the Zebra stuff where they're doing LPS local positioning system data on every game, they would know.
Darren Burgess:I guess the thing about that is as well. The answer to that might be okay, we'll assess them using a skill battery, which both the AFL and the NFL do. The problem is there's probably the top 20% of draft. People in the NFL don't test, because I'm not going to test there. I've just played four years of college, or three years of college. Go and have a look at the tape. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm not going to throw for you here. So, yeah, there's a number of ways in which they do it over there, but I will still, if I have a chance. Jason be watching.
Jason Weber:Oh, yeah, Well, I tell you in the physical performance industry, then one of the big ones that you see is how many guys did you work with? That got drafted.
Darren Burgess:There'll be Instagrams of plenty, yeah, yeah.
Jason Weber:And the 40-metre sprint's a big one. The guys will say how many did you get in the top 10? You know, and they're talking small margins of gain, but these cats are fast. I mean they're fast. They were fast when they started Like yes, we made them a bit faster. But you know, at that end of the market, getting guys running, you know, low fours over 40 yards, I mean those guys are genuine speed coaches.
Jason Weber:They're there. You know track and field almost. Anyway, mate, listen, we need to move on with the afternoon's shuffle. You have a good afternoon. Best of luck for the weekend. We've got Anzac Day games coming up in Australia. So, man, you have a good one and we will speak next week and go from there.
Darren Burgess:Cheers Josh.
Jason Weber:Cheers guys, thanks group.