Two Coaches & a Coffee

Surging to Victory 2: a practical view

• Darren Burgess & Jason Weber • Season 2 • Episode 27

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Can meticulous training strategies really make or break a team’s season? Join me, Jason Webber, as I navigate the fine line between fitness and fatigue in the realm of elite athletics. With Darren Burgess temporarily away, I dive deep into the critical aspects of athlete preparation, particularly as the season reaches its climax. Learn how the science of training impulse can predict and manage fitness gains, and discover why recovery weeks are just as crucial as high-intensity training sessions. By comparing the impacts of training loads across different sports like swimming and football, I share actionable insights gleaned from my experiences with top-tier athletes and teams.

Transitioning to the specifics of AFL, the conversation highlights the dangers of excessive practice and the importance of maintaining optimal training volumes. Through a candid recount of a season where heightened training before finals led to a spike in injuries, I underscore the delicate balance required to prevent performance decay and ensure athletes are ready for peak performance. The episode wraps up with a discussion on training specificity and injury prevention, emphasizing the need to balance skill retention with overall athletic capacity. Anticipating Darren’s return, I encourage you to share your thoughts and engage with our community.

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Jason Weber:

G'day and welcome to what I'm going to call this week. Two Coffees and One Coach. I'm Jason Webber and again I'm still on the road internationally and therefore I've lost my buddy, darren Burgess again. We're hoping that next week with me back in Australia and the AFL unfortunately finished for Darren next week that maybe, while he's on holidays in the Maldives, we might be able to catch him for a comment. But in lieu of that, of the approximately three or four listeners, we have a couple reached out through last week with respect to my last discussion on what we probably call a surge towards the end of a season and preparing your athletes and your team for surging and approaching a final series. So the question I got asked was a couple of specific things, but most importantly was looking for some more examples of things that maybe I'd experienced with respect to that. So I've got a couple of stories I will share, but what I wanted to start with was more the conversation around where do we start? Where do we start? Why would some teams get themselves in a position where they're excessively loaded going into a final series? Equally, why would a team get themselves in a position where they're genuinely underdone? So I think it falls to this.

Jason Weber:

There's some classic research that was done by a guy named Bannister years ago. I looked at. It was the fundamentals of the I guess the stress impulse, training impulse it's probably a better term training impulse method. So the balance of the fatigue generated by a single training intervention and the fitness generated from that, and so the different decay curves of those two things, of fitness versus fatigue, would allow you to predict where an athlete might be Now mathematically. Those things have gone through different evolutions and they've certainly improved, and we've delved into using them with heart rates and creating training impulses around that. And now we have distances and we're looking at exponential decays with respect to what we feel is that we call the training load. But one of my biomechanics gurus, professor Jack Yeltsin, would absolutely have my neck in a brace if I were to go out training loads. We're going to call it training interventions. So what training are we imparting on the athlete? Not so much load. It's not a mechanical load. There are mechanical loads, but we can't know them, we don't measure them. So what's this balance between freshness and fatigue? And I think that's the crux of what we're getting to. So have we done enough work to create a fitness effect that then will sustain us over a period from which we can allow it to resolve.

Jason Weber:

Now the resolution of training load or training interventions. Training expos, exposures is a really interesting thing. Now people will talk about tapering. Now I think there's a very vast difference between tapering an athlete and resolving training interventions, training exposures. I think that the tapering of an athlete when you've got um alic athlete, say like a triathlete or a swimmer or something, they're going through high level, high volumes, really high volumes, and they're going to bring them back down and train to peak for a single event. I think that's quite different to a team sport where you have ebbs and flows in both game exposures and then training exposures, and that the resolution of training interventions, I think, is relatively fast within a team environment. I think you can resolve training big weeks very, very quickly.

Jason Weber:

I've not seen many. Many years ago, when I started in this sports science journey and conditioning journey, I started in swimming and so I worked around with a squad that had some Olympic swimmers and I saw what genuine load looks like and how long it does take to resolve, whereas in football, even after a big pre-season I've seen I've been in some big pre-seasons in AFL you can see them like you only take a week of relatively lower training and guys seem to bounce back quite nicely, but you can retain that effect for some time. So I guess the question is starting to understand your athletes and what their rate of resolution is. Now there was a school of thought that I there was an author whose name is going to elude me for the moment but talked about understanding the effects. What was the fitness effect of a given session and what time did it take to resolve? Now I would certainly say that I think personally, for things like to sustain VO2 max, one of the things we work with in team sports is a general concept that I think came out of research in the EPL, which I may be corrected on by someone, probably Darren but looked at 80 metres per minute as an average. If you've got a mean of 80 metres per minute in your general football sessions, that is enough to sustain VO2. Now I've found that to be relatively true. I've also found that by manipulating the intensity of drills and getting your speed content, your higher work rates up, that within the context of team training you can quite comfortably retain really good levels of both aerobic and anaerobic fitness. Now the question then becomes which is challenging in a lot of sports is, as soon as you take the content, the contact component out, it changes the nature of what you've got to do in training. So yeah, there is a complexity to that, but understanding how quickly your athletes bounce back from certain types of training is key to understanding resolution and understanding that.

Jason Weber:

Well, okay, if we put in a couple of hard weeks of training, what do I need to have these guys resolve? Now? I worked with one of my speed city college football teams just this past week and we'd done some work just on the side on helping them organize some training planning and the like. And they've just gone through a similar thing, what they would call that resolution week, that recovery week down to 60% of their training load of the previous week, which is their maximum, which, if you check on the old resources, there's Vladimir Zatsiosky, the rule of 60. If you can get your recovery week to 60% of sort of drop of 40 from your peak load, that is meant to be ideal. Now he achieved, he got 62%. The team that I was speaking to and they his words are that they're bouncing back and they're ready to go and they're about to go into competition. So that's a. That was an excellent outcome.

Jason Weber:

But it's also relevant to understand and try and figure out what your team's like. An older team might take a little bit longer, a younger team might take a little bit less. If you've got a combination of the two, it may mean that you need to vary the nature of your athlete's training. Coming out of that recovery block, some may need to start earlier than others, but it's worthwhile having a look at because that resolution of training is super important. Now, is that recovery? Is that tapering? I tend to not like the term tapering at all.

Jason Weber:

I don't like coming down into games, because I think not only do you run the risk of having people think that, okay, we've got to maintain this fresh thing, we've got to be fresh, we've actually just got to balance our training load so that we keep our condition and then we can, at the right time, resolve training to have us appropriately prepared for a game. So there are going to be games that you hope to be, you know, the top of the table clash or that sort of thing. You hope to be, um, far more, I guess, fresh for as compared to and this is unfortunate, but you get to play teams that may be travelling or teams that may be at the bottom of the ladder. It may be pertinent that you do a little bit more work in those weeks. Now that brings into the conversation the tactical periodisation, and do we evolve our periodisation to match the load of the games that we expect to play? And obviously, with tactical periodization, it also brings in the evolution of skill that we're not going to train all skills all the time, but that we're going to have different emphasis in different weeks and bring them up Now.

Jason Weber:

That brings us then, I guess, to the point of risk aversion, of is there a point at which we have staff within our team that feel like we need to cut train? We need to not risk what we're doing. What we're doing is too risky and we're better off getting them on the field than risking anything. Now, there is a great old saying in sailing in order to finish first, first you must finish. There's no point being the fittest team in the world but not being able to get your players on the park. So I can get that sense. Yeah, we've got to get them on the park, but there's also no point getting them on the park if, in the last four rounds, they drop from third to tenth on a ladder which is what happened to an AFL team these past couple of weeks from third to 10th, with very close results. But what you see is and what you hear the comments that that team in particular, their skill execution under pressure in the last few minutes, week to week, was poor.

Jason Weber:

Now, was that just coincidence or was that a matter of preparation? Not for me to say, but I think it's part of considering that an environment that becomes excessively risk averse will not train those moments typically. So then there is a discussion that's going to have to take place between the conditioning coach, us and the coaching staff. We need to keep those things going. Skills is not necessarily our thing, but we need to create the environment. We need to create the space in which those skills can be developed. Skills, or you'd probably say more appropriately, interactions between players. They have skills established, but there might be those moments where there's a decision do I pass left, do I pass right, et cetera, et cetera. So it's not all going to be just physical. It's really critical that we create the environment in which players can execute.

Jason Weber:

Now, in American football they will religiously do two-minute drills because reading into the end of a game, if you can control the ball for a drive for two minutes and score at the end of it, you put your opposition at disadvantage and quite often games come to that. So the American football contingent are well versed in establishing that there's a tempo. There's a two-minute thing we're going to do Now. When we look at the AFL in the last bunch of weeks and Darren and I have talked about this it's been a very tight table so they've been competing super hard. This means some very high-level games. Now do you need to practice those last couple of minutes? Do you need to practice those clutch shots? You know, in some of these games that came down to just to kick a goal, guy had an open shot and couldn't nail it. That happens enough in football. You know the goal was open. We get to the they call it statistically the XG spot. We get to the they call us statistically the XG spot and have the shot and you can't take it. So do we need to practice that? But I think it's our responsibility as the conditioning staff to ensure that the environment is ripe for that and available Now.

Jason Weber:

In a highly risk-averse environment. You're not going to want to go to those spaces. You know I've been reflecting this week on some of those events. You know how would you get them there? There's no point people practicing their kicking when they're fresh, because that's not the conditions under which these guys, I guess, failed in the story I just relayed. They're going to be relatively cooked, so you don't want to cook people through the week but you might want to put them under a degree of lactic stress where you know, yes, their breathing rate's super high, pulse is up, they're going, they're under the pump and they've got to hit these goals. But to get those levels of physiological response in that environment you can't be risk averse, you've got to work. So it becomes a really, really interesting discussion on where this risk aversion is coming from. Is it coming from performance staff? Now, I've had a few people this week say to me it's the medical staff. That program there is run predominantly by medical people. Therefore they are risk averse. So if that's the case, I mean it may be that we need to speak up against them.

Jason Weber:

In my current deployment, so to speak, I'm working in and around tactical environment and I just read on the wall this afternoon at a facility I was at. In battle, you won't rise to the occasion. You will fall to the level of your training. There you go, and in the project I'm currently working on, that is what this project's about. It's about generating an appropriate stress response to have people execute in that environment.

Jason Weber:

And that's exactly what we're talking about in sport is not only can we physiologically execute, so are we fit enough, are we fast enough? Are we strong enough? All of those bits and pieces, but have the coaches had enough time to educate? Have the players had enough time to practice? Have the players had enough time to practice? And this is a really, really important thing is practice versus training? Right, there's, you know. Again, we go back to the swimming example. You're doing physiology training every day and you're practicing your skill. You know, team sports can be a little bit different in that you can practice the skill of your sport without necessarily being physiologically challenged. Equally, we could go out for a run and be physiologically challenged but not practice our sport. So finding that medium is really important and that's that kind of piece around risk aversion. So, if I move on a little bit from that and we might come back to that in a moment though. But when you look at risk aversion and you look at what we're trying to say about we're surging towards the end of the season, how do we do it?

Jason Weber:

We're looking to resolve our training. We know we need to keep some training volume up, and I don't just use the word then training volume. We need to be able to do a certain amount of it. I think I've conveyed by what I said earlier about maintaining average speeds in certainly my experience in AFL and then drill speeds that are appropriate. I'm very big on, yeah, understanding exactly what players are doing in training and, I think, measuring being the nerd I am, having built SpeedSig and all that sort of stuff I am absolutely for understanding, measuring the game in all of its components, including contact and the nature of the contest with the ball, which I think is the most unclear. Let me put that across the environment, because we have GPS. It's telling us how sprints and our axles decels.

Jason Weber:

One of the biggest areas of contention is what happens when we go into contact, and that is a really big area. It's an area that I've worked quite a bit in, but if I then drag that back to what I'm saying about practice and volume is that you need to be able to execute those things at the appropriate rate. And if you keep working towards oh we're just going to do a little bit, just a little bit and we'll just keep fresh, those things are going to decay, because we know there's a relationship between the amount of training done and then the resolution. And if you keep doing less and less and that training keeps resolving to nothing, you end up decaying. So when we talk about practice versus volume this is a key learning point for me was getting coaches to understand hey, we're coming into finals, we don't necessarily need to practice more. The guys have already learned what they're going to learn. We need to have the right execution volume and intensities to maintain our fitness and the right we expose them to some training practice, but not an extraordinary amount, which I guess can lead me down the path of my first story.

Jason Weber:

So my first story sort of pertains directly to that where excessive practice and a couple of other features unravelled the team I worked with. So in the AFL we were approaching finals, we'd done really well throughout the course of the year and we were very big on, as I said, training at very specific rates and understanding work rates and understand that there were easy days and easy components, but other things that we had to do at game speed and some things were over game speed. But when you get to the point where you've got players on an edge, so because of maybe game exposure, because of the type of time on ground output they're doing, you then start to get to practice and practice is retained at a high level and the coach goes no, no, we've got to do more, we've got to do more, we haven't done enough. Not happy with that, got to do more. And that's okay. Very, very short periods.

Jason Weber:

But when that becomes a chronic thing, it's not every, it's becomes every week and slowly you get these volume changes. Uh, and the team I'm referring to, we we got changes in the in the five to six weeks preceding finals and that is associated with a number of injuries which ultimately caused a team that was at the very top of the table to crash and crash in the final series because players were not available, which goes back to the old thing of in order to finish first, first you must finish. So she's a balancing act, there's no question. I'm not the one who would say, yeah, it's all training and no risk aversion. I think you've got to be smart, you've got to make sure you get your people on the field, but you want to get them on. As I mentioned earlier, you know you won't in battle, you won't rise to the occasion, you'll fall to the level of your training. You've got to train the way you're going to play, no question. And then it becomes the planning being able to resolve that training and get that through. And I will say from my perspective what has been.

Jason Weber:

My experience is that volume is the thing that tends to kill teams and cook them. Cook players, create overload, injuries. It's not the intensity, like we can go out and train fast and train at game rates. And again a minute's of generalisation. Obviously players have to be prepped for that and built at game rates. And again a minute of generalisation. Obviously you players have to be prepped for that and built up to it. But let's again, I'm saying that we trained. My experience is I tend to train at those speeds, so we hold them at those speeds. But when we blow that volume up, when there becomes too much practice and we do too much at that speed, that's a problem because then not only a year. Yes, we're getting higher speed volume, we're getting higher total volumes, and the one that I think people don't look at enough is we get very high volumes in the medium zones, in the five to six metres per second, probably four to six. So volume is always going to be the thing. I think, the ability to train at speed, at game speed, and execute practice at those speeds and practice correctly.

Jason Weber:

Someone said to me the other day about practice, about, you know, it's the amount of practice, the amount of repetitions you get. And I said no, it's not, it's about the amount of perfect practice you get. You've got to practice the it's the amount of practice, the amount of repetitions you get. And I said no, it's not, it's about the amount of perfect practice you get. You've got to practice the way it's intended. It's not just doing reps, it has to be reps, correct reps, which I suppose comes back to the point I'm making earlier about if we're training to be under pressure and to win those tricky moments. Do we need to engender, you know, drills that have people execute those tight decisions? Do we have to get them to practice those decisions and execution of skill under pressure? I think yes. I think the other story that I would bring, which is probably a more not quite a happy ending, but not far off With respect to planning, though, and having discipline, sticking to it, was the much maligned Eddie Jones back in 2003 World Cup with the Wallabies Rugby World Cup.

Jason Weber:

Now, at that stage, the Wallabies had had we didn't really have the personnel after the 99 World Cup a lot of retirees. Sorry, I've got to work the coffee there. It is, yeah, very much needed. So the Wallabies have not got the personnel In the middle of 2003, had some disastrous results. Anyway, we had a very specific plan. We had talked about trying to get trained to the appropriate level, but within the context that we had, we couldn't, so we made sure we had some Eddie listened and we got some running involved in it, so we kept our training really high. So we get to the Rugby World Cup, and we really planned out Now, this is pre-GPS For all those bunnies out there that had been born into the GPS world.

Jason Weber:

There was a world before GPS. We actually used heart rates, and we used a heart rate system that I bummed off the Adelaide Crows back in the day, but exceptional system. The idea was, though, that we knew we had to train at test match intensity Anyway. So we got all that done, but the World Cup was executed to a T. So I think there were, let's say there were three or four pool games you play and then three games quarterfinal, semifinal, final. Three or four pool games you play and then three games quarterfinal, semifinal, final. Now we had continued to train hard right through the pool games and we'd started to drop training back to help resolve that load, that exposure sorry Jackie in the quarterfinal, leading into which was Ireland at the time, and we just got through by the skin of our teeth. Now you've got to wonder, were we just not fresh enough? I don't know, but we got through.

Jason Weber:

Planning was good. Following week, in the semifinal against New Zealand, all Blacks were a great team, perfect execution. Eddie had a remarkable game plan, one of the best that I've in any sport seen to this point. His planning was extraordinary, but I will also say again, for a man who's been maligned for his training programs of recent years, his execution of the training volumes in that period. We stuck the task. And so that game against New Zealand, we were exceptional, we won. We were able to win the game, which was the Kiwis had beaten us by 50 points the previous June. This was in October, november, so we were up against it and we didn't have the personnel. But I think exceptional game plan I'll say exceptional preparation they were ready and they went Now looking at our RPE models back in the day everything was peaking just right.

Jason Weber:

The next week we played the final against England, which the Poms will all help us remember my English friends always help me remember that they beat us by a field goal in double overtime or something to that effect. Again, they were the best team at the time. We probably didn't deserve to be there from a personnel perspective, but from a team perspective we executed as a team. To this day I would still say that we resolved. We trained really hard, we resolved quickly. Did we nearly miss it by being a bit fatigued against ireland? Hard to say, but I think you're going to run that fine line. But our skills were executed to a t. Again, the kiwi game plan required specific skills to be executed by players. They were able to do it.

Jason Weber:

I think that's a great example of getting a great plan together, people sticking to it, so discipline. But it also painted a picture for me about what it means to get players right, stick to a plan. I've seen the previous story where there was a plan and the plan went off the rails quite markedly and created problems and ultimately led to a team that maybe should have gone further, not going further. So there is a balance. But I think, if I wrap this up, my theme so far for today has really been this idea of resolution of training exposure. So we put players in that training is going to help us get fitter and it's going to help us get better at our skills, given they're executed at the right, the appropriate intensity, but they also have a fatigue component that has to be resolved.

Jason Weber:

My contention would be in team sports we can resolve things pretty quickly, so I don't think there's a need for a month-long tapering phase. Like you might see, as I said, in a more cyclic athlete, we can resolve them relatively quickly. But I think the balance has got to be around retaining that perfect practice, and that perfect practice has to be at speed. Now. I think your risk aversion is going to come back to you way back in the early part of your season. This is where we want to go.

Jason Weber:

At some point you're going to need to say to players. This is what we're preparing for. But at some point you may end up saying to a coach hey look, our team's too young, we can't sustain that load or that particular speed we want to hit. I know when we had an older team we're able to do more. We can't do it with this team. But it's going to be about that appropriateness of the individuals for that expectation.

Jason Weber:

But I think you've got to have that expectation of what specific practice is specific practice for skill, but specific practice to retain the, the capacities that we need because, yeah, we can run around the block, we can do reps, we can do mas, we can do all that stuff, but ultimately, the practice of the game and being able to get to that exact, this is what we're going to do. And we can overload. That is ideal. I mean the notion that things like again. There was a story recently of a team that did all their football training, then did additional fitness, but it was all composed of change direction. So that change direction load was extraordinary. Change of direction exposure, sorry Jack. So this team ended up with a whole stack of injuries because they were trying to get more training exposure out of a somewhat specific task but just ended up cooking their athletes.

Jason Weber:

So again, balance, balance, but understanding your players and then working towards a position where you can resolve the training that you've put into them, not looking at just tapering I don't like that word resolve, resolution of resolution of your training exposure. Then, and at that point of resolution, your athletes will be 100% ready to go. So I hope there was a little bit more specificity in there for the two listeners that asked For the third guy that didn't ask well, dude, you need to get on the phone. There's only three of you Got to get on and ask a question. So, as I finish my second coffee for this podcast, hopefully we'll have Darren back next week and there'll be two of us and you won't have to listen to my banter all by myself. But you guys have a great end of the week and we look forward to speaking to you when I'm back on. Aussie time Cheers.