Two Coaches & a Coffee

Season 3, Epsiode 2

• Darren Burgess & Jason Weber • Season 3 • Episode 2

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In this episode, we explore the complexity of injuries in the AFL, questioning whether short preseasons are a factor in the increasing number of athletic injuries. We discuss training intensity, the evolution of the game, and the importance of professional development for coaches.

• Analysis of recent injuries within the AFL landscape 
• Discussion of the implications of short preseason training 
• Examination of explosive gameplay and its injury risks 
• Insights on current training practices and adaptations 
• The need for mentorship and professional development among coaches

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Jason Weber:

G'day and welcome to Two Coaches and a Coffee Darren Burgess and Jason Weber with you. Second one for 2025, b, we're back and we're being a little bit consistent.

Darren Burgess:

Hey mate, good to see you two weeks in two down. Yeah, sorry, a bit of background noise for anybody watching this on YouTube. I'm at the airport Virgin Lounge in Melbourne after spending a day doing a conference, which is something that we're going to talk about today. I've just been told oh yeah.

Jason Weber:

Well, we've got a few things to dig into, but I guess the pressing issue at the moment that we're seeing is what's happening in AFL land A few injuries about. I actually just heard about another one.

Darren Burgess:

It's all over. It's all over the news at the moment. It's all over All over the news at the moment and I'm doing that there's an Indigenous All-Stars game next week in Perth. So we'll be doing two coaches and a coffee in the studio.

Jason Weber:

We will, or the pub, or the pub or a cafe. Yeah, yeah, it might be two coaches and a beer, exactly.

Darren Burgess:

And, as part of that, the best Indigenous and First Nations players from Australia are going to play against Fremantle. Anyway, I'm on a coach's WhatsApp group and almost daily every oh so-and-so's going to miss so-and-so's out.

Jason Weber:

Yeah.

Darren Burgess:

They've selected sort of 30 players and a lot of those haven't made the media alert.

Darren Burgess:

But within the media there are people going down like flies and a lot of speculation is on the length of the pre-season.

Darren Burgess:

Now our overseas counterparts are going to laugh when we say that a lot of comment from within the industry have been that the pre-season is too short, even though we start in November and don't play games until March. But I think probably more appropriately or my view anyway is that it's not too short at all. The length of time is fine, but it's the intermittent nature of it. We've trained for two weeks, then there's three weeks off, then we train for another train for two weeks, then there's three weeks off, then we train for another week and a half, then there's another four days off, then we train for that three weeks and the season starts. So it's very intermittent in nature and therefore the consistency of training is not ideal. So we're seeing a lot of tendon injuries, a lot of hamstrings that are hamstring tendon, not stress injuries, and certainly a lot of ACL and Achilles. So much of some of the discussions we've had in the past about the NFL.

Jason Weber:

Yeah Well, mate, there's no debate. If you go to the other side of the spectrum like, yes, there's the breaks and we've talked about that, but the game has evolved and the league has created a game where it's got faster. It was supposed to get slowed down because of rotations, but, as always happens, like in the environment, mate, water always finds a way In a building site. Same thing Water will always find its way in there. One of the things I've always found with rule changes is coaches will find a way to figure it out and to work the rules to their advantage, and what we've done is we've hybrided players. We've now got players that I think you correct me if I'm wrong just getting a little bit smaller. They've just reduced weight just a little bit, but the running's gone through the roof.

Darren Burgess:

Well, what's happening is because the defensive structure. So for those of us who are not familiar with AFL, if you imagine, a bit like basketball now, where the defences are encouraged to retreat back into their half or press aggressively, there are only two options. And if you retreat back into your half and then get the turnover, you are demanded that you explode and sprint in offense and get to the other end of the ground as quickly as possible. It's not maintain possession like in soccer or football. It is genuinely of the ground as quickly as possible. It's not maintain possession like in soccer or football. It is genuinely get to the goal as quickly as possible, like a fast break in basketball. So the decisive actions are all explosive, yeah.

Jason Weber:

But just to be clear on that, that fast break's 150 metres ballpark.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, that's right.

Jason Weber:

If you go straight line from goal square to goal square it will take its 150 and they usually go around the arc a little bit. So it's a big fast break and if you're trying to get to the end of that fast break, man, you've got to.

Darren Burgess:

You're trying to beat your opponents back and then even the last line of defence.

Darren Burgess:

So the full-back is demanded, that that full-back sprints from the goal square to halfway as quickly as possible to compress the ground. So the decisive actions are explosive. So maybe the people at AFL land are looking at league-wide GPS numbers and maybe the metres per minute are the same. Maybe I don't know, but maybe they're the same. But what I know from collecting carter over the years, the explosive actions are just going through the roof and, as you know, they're the options that cause injuries. So it's no, and people, because there's less time to train match play than there has been previously, coaches are understandably and justifiably getting them to match play sooner. And so often a lot of that match play is also because you know you can't play 18 on 18 in training every week because you don't have that many players on the park. So you're playing 15 on 15, bigger fields, more explosive. So it's a recipe for disaster, disaster, and that's exactly what's happening here's a question, my friend, here's a question.

Jason Weber:

If we were training sprinters, let's say, let's say we're training a 400 meter runner, so a 400 meter runner is not going to run maximum velocity, the whole 400, but maximum velocity is still an important part. So same in afl. You can have a guy that's got super high speed, but really it's. It's the same in AFL, you can have a guy that's got super high speed but really it's the maximum fraction of that that he can sustain in reps up and down, because that's the running he has to do so when you're in training and don't give away any secrets or anything, but do you as a professional work towards drills that are actually over speed so they actually get guys to change direction, like change polarity, like defend into attack but, do it super explosively to create that overload.

Jason Weber:

Do you guys go down that path?

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, we've done it a lot this preseason, which we probably haven't done. We've done the max velocity part, but we haven't done the overspeed and the react from defence into attack or, more importantly, attack into defence as quickly and in an overspeed manner than we have done this year. We've done a lot this year, so we're trying to prep the boys as best we can. I'll let you know in about eight months whether we've got it right or not.

Jason Weber:

Just to be clear on terminology there for everyone listening.

Jason Weber:

I'm not talking about attaching a rubber band to somebody and making them go. I'm talking about doing football drills that are actually faster than we would expect in a game so that the athletes acquire a capacity to deal with that. Like Darren's saying that maximum change of, not just change of direction, but hey, I'm defending, now I'm attacking and I've got to go. And having that in your plan and the ability to do it with a coach is challenging If the coach doesn't get it it's difficult.

Darren Burgess:

And the difficult thing about it, as you know, jason, is you can do things like, say, bronco runs and those sorts of things which are pretty popular in rugby and becoming more and more popular in AFL. And so Bronco runs was a particular distance, but basically shuttle run over a decent period of time or a decent distance. So not just 10 and 5 metres shuttle, but that's teaching repeat shuttles In a game. You might do one of those every 25 seconds or 5 minutes or 7 minutes, you don't know, but that one has to be absolutely flat out. So it's not you make it up and back within this time, it is you get one effort, otherwise it's a goal. And then you walk into the centre square and you know your coach has got the shoots with you. So it's an important part of training. We try and do it pretty well, but who knows?

Darren Burgess:

But what I do know is that you know we're even talking now about a lot of jump landing stuff, a lot of jump landing under fatigue and just things like that, because there are just so many injuries that are happening throughout the whole league and they're all innocuous. They're all seemingly innocuous, but there is a reason for them. And even last year. Just to sort of round this up, my footy manager came to me with a stat only recently saying that by round seven, round eight last year, there were a record number of missed games within the AFL. So this just isn't media speculation. This is fact, and the Players Association have demanded these changes, and it's the players currently who are suffering. So I'm not suggesting that we need to scrap all holidays and give them money for a week, but I think there just needs to be a middle ground somewhere.

Jason Weber:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's no doubt I would also be interested as an outsider. So I know and we talked about this a bit last week that we're at that week in the year where training's peaked and we're about to start tapering off Right now. Right, Everybody's sweating bullets because it's high risk. It's like going to camp, you know, in the NFL college football.

Darren Burgess:

It's bang.

Jason Weber:

It's on. My question it is a genuine question is and there have been times that I've seen my team get to a point well before that where I go like they're ready, they are ready to go, yet you're still marking time for maybe another two weeks. And the question is much and this is not dissimilar from the soccer thing how quickly can we get them up to the appropriate volumes? Like, do we drag volume a little bit too long? Hard to say.

Darren Burgess:

That's a good question, you would argue. I have objective loads to suggest that in soccer we get to similar loads within 2-3 weeks of preseason, but they've had less time off. They've only had 4 weeks off. They've only had four weeks off, whereas our guys have had 10 or four weeks away from the club. There's a range of confounding factors which might influence that, but I think generally they're more conservative than myself.

Darren Burgess:

I'm going to pick any other announcements, what I would create. I love having time off. I don't want to work more. In case anybody from the Players Association is listening to this, I want more time off. Give me more time off so I can spend time with my family. You know no problem. But it's not the clubs who are suffering, it's the players who are suffering, because the clubs are on an even keel. All the clubs are the same. They're all suffering the injuries. No one's getting away with it more than or less than others. It is the players who are suffering and their careers and their capacity to earn and all those things are suffering. So, um, I'm not coming at this from a club point of view because, hey, if they say, come back in january, so we had 14 weeks off over Christmas, I'll be the first to book a holiday in and take the kids somewhere.

Jason Weber:

Well, if that's the go mate, I might have to jump back into AFL.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, yeah, get back in.

Jason Weber:

This entrepreneur business is way too difficult. Way too difficult 25 hours a day, seven days a week. Like it's madness.

Darren Burgess:

But in a seamless transition into our next segment. Jason, think of all the things that you learnt in that time, correct, which I don't get to learn if I only stick to Clubland.

Jason Weber:

No, that's true, and I guess you've done such a brilliant job at connecting our threads. I had an interesting conversation this morning. One of them and most of that conversation, a lot of it pertained to question was professional development. Like we've got a group of people, got a young practitioners, and they're saying we need more professional development. Yet in the particular job they're in, they're actually exiting the building pretty quickly so they're not sticking around to study a bit more or to see what somebody else is doing. Or when we have, let's say, we had guests coming in. So I'm in a particular environment and I get Darren Burgess in Mate.

Jason Weber:

If I was a second year, third year coach, I would be sticking on Virgil like you know a fly on you know what, because you're going to learn something. I mean, I remember. I mean I'm a failed rugby player from way back. But I remember my dad saying when I first went to senior training when I was a kid. He said that guy, you know player X, he plays for the Wallabies, he's the best. Blah, blah, blah, follow him. Everything he does just get in his pocket. And I nearly got in a fight with the guy because he wanted me to go away, but that was the point.

Jason Weber:

So here's my question is given your experience, what do you think for young practitioners and I'm talking maybe five years experience and I'm not talking serious experience, I mean, I think they've done a bit of, they've come out of the personal training, they've done some team stuff, sub-elite, right, mate? What do you think? Mentors courses rush off and do you know? There's a plethora of people doing PhDs that all seem to be the same. They're either load monitoring or force velocity profiles. What do you think, mate? Give us your two bobs worth.

Darren Burgess:

I think you can't beat talking to people within the industry within not necessarily where you want to go but if you are an NFL strength coach or American football strength coach, in any system, don't just talk to people within NFL I'm not necessarily talking and go on secret the CEO of Google I'm talking. Start off with strength coaches in soccer, in tennis, within elite sports that have similar issues to yourself and might offer a different way about it. Don't go to if I'm a strength coach at Birmingham City. Don't go to Liverpool for a strength coach, because they're going to have almost identical issues with you. They just have a shiny authorities and a better facility. Go to the strength coach of the Sky Cycling team or many rugby league teams in that area. Go there and chat to those professionals more experienced the better.

Darren Burgess:

But even then it doesn't have to be that. It can be fellow young professionals who. That is the number one path that I would go down a booked podcast, audible, you know they're all fine, no problem, and you pick up little bits of gold nuggets. I spent all day today at a conference in melbourne and picked up a few things, um, but I picked up way more sitting around the table with um matt innes, nick poolos, alex sagajan um josh manual must coach a couple of the coaches from hawthorne talking. Talking with them Matty Hash and Mike Young from QAS. Those people I got a lot more out of spending half an hour with them than I did listening to some very good presenters, mate.

Jason Weber:

I'll go on another one Mate, I agree, and I'm going to push it even further. I think you talked about a strength coach going from football to like a rugby code or vice versa, or cycling. I'm going to take another view and say that you know, you've got people all the time asking me you know, how do we? I want to become a high-performance manager. I want to like do where you're at the moment. We're overseeing performance and medical, and I just hung out with an old mate of mine, michael Dobbin, who's running an institute of sport, but he's overseeing everything medical, performance, psychology, nutrition, everything right. So I think you've got to also the high value in getting outside of your profession. Now I spent a couple of hours on Tuesday with the great Professor Craig Purden, a couple of hours on Tuesday with the great Professor Craig Purdom. Now Purdom is the preeminent physiotherapist out of like I don't know how long five decades four decades at the AIS, but one of the you know tendons.

Jason Weber:

You know big patella tendon, achilles tendon, central tendon, calf central tendon, hamstring. I've seen all, had all those discussions with him, but I had a great. I had about two hours with him on Tuesday discussing running and various bits and pieces. Obviously you know a bit of speed stick action, but just having a conversation with a guy like that right is unbelievable. And here's a learning experience that you don't expect. I think is the one where you have to explain something to somebody. So Darren asked me how does your program work? I've got to explain it. When you can explain something, you understand it.

Jason Weber:

In my opinion, I think the ability to have concise understanding about why you're doing things can fit into those conversations. So I think so. You asked me about my experiences With SpeedSig. I've presented now NFL, we've got clients NFL, nba, college football, epl, rugby, blah, blah, blah, blah blah. Now, yeah, that's great, but you know what I've had to meet those people and speak to them and learn the language.

Jason Weber:

And so when you say in AFL, we're pushing back in defence, you go to football, we're parking the bus, you've got to get those nuances but when you hear yourself present and you start to understand that I'm conveying my message clearly and that then when someone asks the question and I always say to people like what I talk about, it's like a fire for a, um, a caveman. Imagine a caveman the first time you saw fire whoa, be just like a shock. The second reaction is they rub their hands and go well, this is actually quite all right. But the third reaction, the most exciting reaction, is the caveman who goes well, you know what, If we throw more wood on this and make it bigger, then all the saber tooth tigers stay away and we cook food and all that.

Jason Weber:

So then you start speaking to people who go hey, I do this with tendons, Would it work with you? And you go wow, there's something new. And straightaway you're forced to think and I think to support what you said. I think if you can have conversations that are challenging, so you're forced to rationalize your answer and you're forced to start to join pieces together quickly, is incredibly important. But to all of that I will add one caveat that the moment you walk out the door or you shake hands and say thank you very much for that person's time, you start writing notes.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, like I'm doing a to add weight to your argument. I've probably mentioned on here before that certainly you and I are talking about. I'm doing a Master's in Leadership at the moment for a UK university and the best thing that I'm getting out of it one of the really good things I'm getting out of it is going back over, looking at various case studies and applying my own, let's say, leadership style or leadership philosophies to case studies of which I am not part of or they're not decisions in an AFL landscape. So being able to apply what I might do or my leadership style in a cycling, in a surgeon, in a pilot, in all of those things.

Darren Burgess:

It's fascinating and the only way that I'm getting anything out of it is by taking those notes feverishly and then trying to apply them in in, uh, you know conversations with senior coaches, conversations with elite players and all that sort of stuff. So I I think you're um, I think you're right. Whatever knowledge you obtain from those pd things, it's no good if you um, uh, if you don't write it down. I'll give you a quick example of that. Today in um, in this conference I was at the leaders and performance conference we had a um.

Darren Burgess:

It was a navy fighter pilot instructor and I sometimes get a little bit jaded with the number of people in our industry who keep going to the military, keep going for surgeons or keep going for sometimes they sort of think yeah, I understand that, but we're not life or death, so don't pretend that we are.

Darren Burgess:

But he started talking about briefing, debriefing, the military vernacular which you'd be more familiar with than I am, and before I even thought of it and I was gonna he said I know what you're thinking. You're all thinking yeah, I do this, but let me explain how we do it and then let's see if you can pick something out. If you can't fantastic, you're running a great program and so I was a bit unfolded. Yeah, I've heard all this before, got to do a review after action review everyone always does it but the detail that he went into I literally wrote down, I reckon, about five pages of notes and I'll spend the plane trip home putting them in a PowerPoint presentation to present to the coaches. I'm not saying that's a sign of a good presentation, but also I think you have to action it really quickly.

Jason Weber:

Yeah, you do. I think there's two parts that I really like. One is the challenging yourself to think differently. I think if you go down to brain plasticity, that's how you create new neural links, right, Because your brain's challenging itself to find, push that, bring that memory into something else, build something new. So there's number one, that You've got to challenge that space. If you get into your groove and I see this a lot in the States, in the guys who they say they're older they're about 10 years younger than me but they're doing the same thing every week, every year what's going on?

Jason Weber:

you're not solving problems now yeah but that second piece which I really believe is philosophically like bringing those ideas. So you're taking that fighter pilot's ideas and bringing them into your philosophy, into what you believe and what you action every day and again I've talked about this. I've written on podcasts and other places where I think you do need to have a structure. You know you have to have this construct, an idea of you. Know what do I do?

Jason Weber:

I made a comment this morning to someone I don't believe in fake it till you make it. What I believe in is I like the hypotheticals. So if, let's say, I'm in where I am now and you know Arsenal ring me up and say, hey, we want you to come and run this program, I'm like, well, I've never done that before. You'd have to work through the principles. What would I start with? Who would I speak to? How would I do this? How would I organise all these things? But there's no problem with doing that when you don't have that job offer right. So I would use to say to my staff that, frio, it's okay.

Jason Weber:

You're not coming into this meeting now because the coach doesn't want you there and it's going to be a shit show. But we know it's going to be a shit show. How would you handle it?

Darren Burgess:

How would you handle it?

Jason Weber:

When I come back, you tell me how you think you would and I'll tell you how it went.

Darren Burgess:

Yep.

Jason Weber:

That's a hypothetical, so you're starting to, you're building those experiences before you have to have them, and I I think, that's. That's a big one, and even for if I, if you're thinking young coach and you're watching someone, you go hey, why are they doing that? Why are they doing it?

Jason Weber:

in that order at the right time just saying, hey, listen, I saw that that's different to what I do. Why, yeah, like talk shop, like that's what it comes down to. But I do think. Look, I think there's a big place for mentors in the world. I think it just has to. Too often now I'm seeing environments where younger guys are getting employed, and actually I talked about this with Perds Medically there's younger staff being employed, so they're actually losing the leadership at the top end.

Jason Weber:

So that means people are going to have to go and look for mentors, and I think that's getting the right mentor. Man, if you're ever going to put your hand, if you're going to say to someone I want you to mentor me, you need to run them through the absolute ringer. Are you the right person for me, do you? What do you bring to this, this panel? Because, look, man, I'll be first to say, like you see, all these courses that are out there and there's, there's a proliferation in all industries and there's people saying, hey, you know, you can put a course up, doesn't matter if you don't have any expertise, what?

Darren Burgess:

why would we want to?

Jason Weber:

learn off you if you don't have expertise.

Darren Burgess:

So many runs on the ground.

Jason Weber:

Yeah, that's unbelievable, and it doesn't matter how nice it all looks in AI and all that BS.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, yeah.

Jason Weber:

It's people have got to have. If you're going to learn off someone, learn off the people who've been in the trenches, who've done the jobs.

Jason Weber:

Matt I had the privilege the other day to meet with an international S&C coach who is not particularly well academically qualified, but man, he knows what he's doing and it was a privilege to speak with him and to really spend some time. Obviously, we were doing some speed sick stuff, so I was teaching him, but when I'd ask him questions about what he was doing in the environment, man, he just had this great spin on it and so I'm sitting there going. You know, this is good for me because I'm learning from how this guy approaches it, and probably he approaches it in some ways that I can't because it's just his personality and skill set, but yeah, I think the PD.

Darren Burgess:

No, I agree, mate, I will finish on what you said Too many people go to shiny facilities or things like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you get nothing out of that Anyway.

Jason Weber:

One thing to wrap up, I think without a shadow of a doubt. I can't stand people who say hey, darren, you're my boss. What's my professional development? What's my professional?

Darren Burgess:

development plan.

Jason Weber:

How about you drive your own? Yeah, you haven't given me a PD plan.

Darren Burgess:

No mate, it's more like Come on, people, we're better than that.

Jason Weber:

That's right, hey Berger, I want to do this, this and this. Can you help me? Can you connect me? You you know, hey, is you okay with this? I'm gonna go and check out the australian ballet. You know, physio, who are amazing people. Um, that's what we should be doing anyway. Young bucks, get out and do it all right mate, all right now you're off, you have a nice flight, get one more coffee in there at the uh virgin lounge and uh, we'll catch you next week.

Darren Burgess:

Actually live in person. Yeah, baby, see you, mate, yeah.