Two Coaches & a Coffee

Season 3, Epiosde 7

• Darren Burgess & Jason Weber • Season 3 • Episode 7

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Ever wondered what really happens when professional athletes face extreme heat during competition? Or how a simple change in playing surface can derail weeks of careful preparation? This candid conversation between two high-performance coaches pulls back the curtain on the realities of managing elite athletes during the demanding first round of the AFL season.

From thermoregulation strategies in 35°C+ temperatures to the surprising science behind effective cooling methods, our coaches share practical insights rarely discussed publicly. They break down why Marvel Stadium's artificial surface consistently leads to increased injury rates and how the physical transition between venues presents unique challenges for players and performance staff alike.

The discussion takes a fascinating turn when examining a rare public admission from a player claiming their team had "a clear athletic advantage" over their opponents. This leads to a deeper exploration of preparation methods, questioning whether teams focusing heavily on running metrics might be neglecting the crucial metabolic conditioning that comes from repeated contest work. The coaches advocate for measuring and deliberately overloading contact exposure in training—sharing innovative approaches to quantifying these elements using GPS and accelerometer data.

Professional development emerges as a passionate topic for both coaches, who challenge conventional wisdom about career advancement. Their message is refreshingly straightforward: coach anyone who will listen, regardless of level, and learn through direct application rather than waiting for formal education opportunities. "Go and take a team and make your mistakes there" stands as perhaps the most valuable advice for aspiring sports practitioners.

Whether you're a professional in the field or simply fascinated by what happens behind the scenes in elite sport, this episode offers rare insights into the practical challenges faced by those tasked with preparing athletes for competition at the highest level. Subscribe now to join our growing community of like-minded professionals and enthusiasts exploring the art and science of performance.

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Jason Weber:

G'day and welcome to Two Coaches and a Coffee. A little bit of a different look for Darren and I this week. How are you going, mate?

Darren Burgess:

I'm all right Just taking a stroll mate, Not taking this seriously or what.

Jason Weber:

Yeah, no, no, no, very seriously, but I'm not one for multitasking generally, but because of the beautiful day here in Western Australia, I am going to have a bit of a stroll in between, just to keep my health up.

Darren Burgess:

Nice, well done. I'll do the same, but it's raining in Adelaide for the first time in four and a half months.

Jason Weber:

Yeah, I bet.

Darren Burgess:

It's been ridiculous.

Jason Weber:

Mate, first week in the AFL, it's all happened Now for our international viewers. We've talked a little bit before. We've had 15 weeks of pre-season, We've had breaks over Christmas, We've had surgeries, all sorts of stuff. So now it's all systems go, Mate. I'm the viewer on the outside. What did you see? What was it like on the inside for week one?

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, it was a bit of a build-up here for week one. We were playing at home against a team called St Kilda. For those who finished, I think they finished 14th and we finished 15th last year, so but they had a few injuries, to be fair, so they were coming in a bit underdone. So we got a pretty easy win in the end, which was good.

Jason Weber:

Mate, tell me where's your injury status at? Can you tell us that?

Darren Burgess:

I'm glad you asked. No, we're having a good run. We don't have a single player out at the moment, which is pretty good We've got a clean sheet. Yeah, yeah, it's only ever happened one week before in my life, which was the 21 grand final. We had every player train on that week leading into the grand final.

Jason Weber:

So yeah, we've had a fair bit of luck.

Darren Burgess:

And obviously it was yeah, yeah, so it's not going to change, but a good situation. Well, it's been interesting because, as we spoke about on this podcast, we had four really good, experienced staff leave to go on to promotions and better jobs, bigger and better jobs. Bigger and better jobs, yeah it was yeah, yeah, and good luck to them, and they all went with our wishes.

Darren Burgess:

So there was a fair bit of hiring and, yeah, the staff that come in have done an amazing job. So, look, you know as well as I do, Jason, that this week we play Essendon at the MCG and there's every chance there'll be, you know, ankles and knees and hamstrings and calves and groins and concussions and all kinds. So you've got to ride it while you can.

Jason Weber:

So one of those discussions. What Darren's talking about is the surface in Marvel Stadium in Melbourne is a change of surface. So we often this is often a conversation you see it in the NFL a lot they talk about they're going from artificial turf to grass. Sometimes you know they're playing up north, they've got snowy conditions. How much impact does it have?

Jason Weber:

Now, marvel Stadium is like a false floor. It's not like it's a building. You can actually feel the floor vibrate when the guys are running on it. It has very, very short, thin grass so that you quite often will get players struggling to get their cleats stuck into the earth. So what God's just getting at there is what is the like, what happens, what's the change? And that you know we can. We can send teams off to, uh, places like narvel state and they come back with groins and all sorts of things because guys slip and they, you know, get overly extended. But in the same breath, um, we also get athletes that just get cooked because the ground's a little bit harder and it's really a thing. It's no question the change in surface, change in footwear, particularly if you're going from wet surface to a very hard one.

Jason Weber:

Now one of the conversations that I've just lost Darren in our little connection, but one of the points I was going to ask him and we'll get to when he's back, I'm sure is temperature last weekend. So on the first round, from a thermoregulatory perspective, which we don't often talk about a lot of physiology directly, but the question was asked I was just talking before the podcast about the point of the heat was thermoregulatory question. We had players going out to play and there was a lot of talk, particularly in Melbourne, in Geelong, very, very hot, 35, 36 degrees, which is centigrade, which is getting up there in the 90s in Fahrenheit. Yeah, virgil, trying again, he's back, mate. Oh, he's back, he's back. So, mate, the community, which I know is now more than 15, we think. But the community and I were just talking about the thermoregulatory impacts of last week.

Jason Weber:

So particularly the Frio-Gelong game, which was an interesting one. It was hot, but Frio train over here in hot conditions in Perth. So you've got to kind of ask yourself were they prepared for that heat? Did they handle it? Melbourne's had some hot stuff through summer here. So how hot. Like Birjo, you think when you go into a game first round it's always hard, it's always a step up. First round's hot. What do you reckon? How much impact do you see that on you all guys? What did you play this week? What temperature did you guys have?

Darren Burgess:

We kicked off at midday so we were anticipating, you know, enormous heat. It was 37 degrees on the Saturday.

Jason Weber:

We played on the.

Darren Burgess:

Sunday and it was 26 or 27, so it was pretty harmless. But it's interesting. We did as much prep as we possibly could for the heat, and I'm sure every team does it. Players were cramping on both teams. No, you know, we weren't cramping any less than what they were and they weren't cramping any more. But a lot of coaches were talking about summer football or summer AFL, where the grounds are a bit harder, the running is a bit more. There's more mistakes. Therefore, people are running more. Therefore there's the physical demand. We certainly our GPS suggested that we ran a whole lot on the weekend and we've got a six day break. So it's, you know, it's been an interesting week.

Jason Weber:

Did you see speed come up this year or is holding about the same, just more volume?

Darren Burgess:

speed. No speeds come up. Definitely it's one game, so we'll see, and it's one game on a hard surface in summer, so it's like the Premier League playing trial games in July when it's pretty hot. So yeah, it's been interesting. Certainly the adaptation to players, both physically and mentally, because our first four games all start at sort of between 12 and 2 o'clock one on the Gold Coast, two here in Adelaide where it's supposed to be 30 degrees. So yeah, it's going to be a factor for sure. Cramping and education on heat management, but not overhydration, and all that sort of stuff has been interesting. And also there's game management stuff which you can't really control. But you know, if the game's getting a bit too hot.

Darren Burgess:

How can we manage the game a little bit better?

Jason Weber:

So we'll see how we go this week, one of the interesting. I was going to say mate real quick. Do you guys pre-cool? Yeah, we do, you guys do pre-cool yeah.

Darren Burgess:

So, just with ice baths, we've tried gloves as well. We've tried on the bench using gloves, but when you've got to grip the ball it's a bit tricky. We had a misting fan on the bench as well as ice towels, yeah, but it didn't get used too much.

Jason Weber:

Ice towels are always great. Yeah, I think the ice towels are nice and simple. It was interesting. Just before you jump to that one, I'll go to a quick story. 2003 World Cup semifinal was really hot and we knew it was going to be hot. It was predicted anyway. We'd spoken to a bunch of scientists out of University of Sydney and we're looking at like how do we cool these guys down at halftime? You know ice vest and they said no Ice vest. Typically you put the ice vest on, it stops the flow of air over the skin so you get that immediate hit of the cool but you don't get cooling over more of a period. So they said get your room as cold as possible and, within reason, get them stripped down to skin. So we had these guys craft air-conditioned, yeah. So we used an air-conditioned room, we mandatorily took jumpers off everybody and we got guys really cool really fast. It was interesting when you look at the whole ice vest thing.

Jason Weber:

it's conductive versus convective heat loss and that air across cool air across the skin, made it fast, as I've seen.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, watching that Geelong Freo again. The Geelong guys went inside in their air conditioning rooms.

Jason Weber:

Frio probably didn't have that ability because of that wonderful stadium down there at Geelong so they went a quarter time the oppo always get the worst rooms yeah, yeah, exactly.

Darren Burgess:

So who knows how much it played an impact, either mentally or physically. But one of the interesting things was in round zero, or opening round, collingwood played GWS and GWS won and won comfortably. And one of their players came out and said we had a clear athletic advantage over Collingwood. Now Collingwood came out the next week because they played two games. We played one and smashed their opponent and, you know, looked physically dominant, all that sort of stuff. So it was one week. But the media circus went wild here, and probably the overseas people don't understand how many journals and shows uh on in afl, but anyway they went crazy about collingwood's fitness and I've just not seen a player come out publicly and say that we had a clear athletic advantage and and we know that that doesn't necessarily equate to wins and losses, but probably at this stage of the season it has more of an impact, would you say early on in pre-season, early on in the season in most sports.

Jason Weber:

I think. So You've got to wonder how teams run into that first game. Like, do they take it? Like, do teams try to taper? I've found that you taper a football team, you get them too far away from the football and too far away from the work they don't do. Well. So, keeping the work up to them and not trying to deload too fast. But the other one I must say is I think it depends a lot on how you've trained. Like, what's the contest like? Because nothing's like the game. Right, we try to get as close as we can, but clearly there are some things closer than others.

Jason Weber:

Now in AFL one of the biggest metrics is contested ball. You've got to go in and win that ball Like. For anyone overseas watching AFL, yeah, it does look like a slippery bar of soap jumping around all over the place. But the guys who can physically get in there and get it or obtain possession changed the course of the game and it seemed to me like there were certain teams that just didn't seem to be on that in their first outing. I don't know why Was Collingwood not that in the first week, but they were in the second week. It's almost like they had to flick the switch at some point.

Darren Burgess:

It's a bit like when we look at, say, small-sided games in soccer and people come out and say, well, that doesn't change, that doesn't train your high-speed running or your sprint exposure, because you know it's in this small area. What they do really well is repeated contest and repeated metabolic conditioning small, solid games. So in football IFL it's almost the reverse of that. We tend to train running a lot and aerobic conditioning a lot, but maybe we don't train that metabolic conditioning of repeated efforts. And you can simulate it a little bit if you want, with a lot of change in direction and those bronco runs and up-downs and whatever else you can do.

Darren Burgess:

But I think you've really got to expose players to contest work and tackling because, otherwise you just get in the game, especially when you start wrestling opponents and things like that.

Jason Weber:

That takes a lot out of you Right fighting for the ball. Mate, given the nerd that I am my last bunch of years in AFL, it probably was last five I'd build a metric using the GPS or the gyroscope and accelerometers to measure contact or at least estimate it, so that you could comfortably say this session represents an overload of contact. Saying this is an overload Because I agree, man, if you're trying to prepare an athlete for contact, you need to go past the rate that they would do it in a normal game, same as speed. We want to run faster than we're going to go in the game so we can come back to it. Mate, I'm training a few fighters at the moment in a bunch, mainly wrestlers, boxers and some judoka athletes, and we're looking at the same thing. Like you need to be making sure that we're going to the repeat speed in the spaces that you need to, in the timeframes that you need, otherwise that isn't going to work. So, mate, I couldn't agree more.

Jason Weber:

I think that contact piece did teams miss it? Maybe I don't know. Like again, I and this is my ongoing thing about sports science is are we measuring things that answer the questions we need? So Berger's saying do we know what they did in contest? Well, I think we need to try and figure those things out. They're the bits of information that we're missing at different times. Anyway, that's my blurb again, mate.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, hey. No, it's hard to know because of the accuracy of the tool as well, but anyway, go.

Jason Weber:

Hey, quick question. Don't worry the accuracy of the tool, mate. I measure my tool. Hey, tell me this week this is your backyard. So international break this week in soccer across the world.

Darren Burgess:

Yes.

Jason Weber:

So, mate, what are we going to see? So we're going to see a bunch of young guys who don't play internationals, who are only going to play one game for a week, and they're going to feel fantastic. And you're going to get another bunch of dudes who have to play extra and probably fly all over the world to get it done. What's going to happen in the next couple of weeks for those guys?

Darren Burgess:

Well, I reckon you get an idea of what's going to happen by what happened last weekend.

Darren Burgess:

So Newcastle play Liverpool in the Carling Cup or the League Cup or whatever it's called these days, I should know. In the final it was Newcastle's first chance of silverware in however many years, and Liverpool who are clear favourites to win the league, but they just got knocked out of Europe. The Champions League extra time penalties against Paris Saint-Germain yeah. So the last six weeks I think Liverpool played some astronomical amount of games like average two games a week for six weeks, and then Newcastle, the last two weeks, played one game and so they had two weeks to essentially prepare. So you talk about a clear athletic advantage. Yeah, the mental effect we can't ignore of them crashing out of Champions.

Darren Burgess:

League of Liverpool crashing out of Champions League on penalties. Devastating way to go out and then try and get yourself up for a final three days later. Yeah, but there's a clear advantage, and then they only went 2-1 against Newcastle.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, but there's a clear advantage for those teams that don't play in Europe and in this back end of the season. So all you gamblers out there who you know, this is the research you should be doing on who's playing one game a week. Versus the teams that are still in Europe, there is a massive difference, both mentally and physically. So this stage of the year the international break you'll see a lot of players come back to their clubs fatigued after the two internationals, especially some of the Aussies who are playing a home game against Indonesia tonight. Yeah, and they've travelled from Europe to play a home game, then got to travel. I think we played China. Maybe go to China, play there and then travel back to Europe and play for their clubs.

Jason Weber:

Back to Europe.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, the club Back to Europe.

Jason Weber:

Yeah, it's a pretty tough scenario and it's some of the stuff that we're doing at FIFPro to try and address this as best we can Mate. I think, yeah, that's a hugely demanding area and I think, if you know, I talk to a lot of people and this is a subject that's been put in front of me a lot recently is this whole idea of professional development. Yeah, you can go and do courses and all that, but I think taking I'm not saying this podcast is the be-all and end-all by any stretch, but taking that concept that Darren just said of observing what teams are doing, having a look at where they're playing, and looking, looking at just trying to observe, what sort of results are you getting for that, the teams that are backing up, how they go, what players are coming out. I know that all sounds laborious, but that's how you learn. I'll go a step further and say I'm working with a bunch of different athletes at the moment and different practitioners and looking at things like Jack Daniels running that's not Jack Daniels, the bourbon Jack Daniels running formulas, jan Albrecht's formulas in swimming, and starting to understand how those things work, because they describe fundamental physiology against speed. So starting to understand those things really helps build understanding around how you can build programs.

Jason Weber:

I think in terms of professional development, if any podcast is worth anything, maybe you should be taking some of the ideas that get spoken and explore them a little bit. Don't wait for people to put out a course. You've really got to be in my bonnet at the moment about people just waiting for things to come to them. From a professional development perspective, I think you've got to go out and look and figure out and rationalize and discuss where you can how things are working out, Like hey, call your mate. What do you think this podcast is? Me ringing Birger up and going, hey, let's have a cup of coffee. And that went for a while and then we pushed record. That's what it is. You know, get a group of peers around and discuss stuff, see how it fits.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, I just think maybe it's for the next podcast, but we just had our staff reviews at the Crows sort of the post-preseason, before the start of in-season, and PD comes up. A lot in all of it and it's always the same to all staff members is go and speak to people. Go and people think, oh, we need to go here and have a look at this facility. And go to Red Bull in Austria and have a look at that and go to wherever. But it really is. Go and spend some time in Brisbane with some really cool people working at the QAS. Go and spend some time in Sydney with some of the great clubs there. Go and spend some time in Melbourne with some really cool people doing some good stuff there.

Darren Burgess:

That's how you do it, and one of our interns had an assignment. What's the one advice you could give to an aspiring high performance manager? And it was go and take a team. I don't care if it's your sister's team or your brother's team, and go and take them while your personal training or delivering pizzas or working in a bar or whatever it is that you do want to get some money. Go and take a team and make your mistakes there.

Jason Weber:

Mate, do you know? That was one of the same bits of advice I got as a young coach. When you get the chance, coach anybody, coach anybody who will listen and no matter who you're coaching, respect the job that you're doing for those people. And, mate, also I was working with an Olympic judoka athlete this morning and I actually said like I appreciate you guys listening to what I'm saying and to engaging, and they were really humbled by it. I said like I've got to respect what you are and you've got to respect that from people at the very lowest level.

Jason Weber:

People say to me oh, why did you go and coach've got to respect that from people at the very lowest level. Like people say to me oh, why did you go and coach high school the last couple of years? And high school is one of the best coaching things I've done in recent times because you're re-engaging with people who need to learn motor skills from the bottom up. Now you can't just coach at the top. And I've had a few people say to me recently hey, I'm much better when I'm coaching the elite. I coach the best ones. Nah, dude, you coach the. You know what skill you coach the youngest one, the worst one, the injured one, right, you know what. You tell you. Where I'm at at the moment, I'm also coaching a couple of Paralympians.

Jason Weber:

Tell you what that's me learning now. Like you, try to figure that out and these people are unbelievable characters. Mate, like you talk resilience, people have had to deal with some of the things they've dealt with make so much respect, but that's how you learn to coach, in my opinion. I agree with you, man go out and coach whoever you can, bro. Bro, what's on you gotta? You gotta get off to afternoon tea or something. Is that what you're gonna be about?

Darren Burgess:

about. No, this is today is a day off. So, as you know, no days off, no days off, but we travel tomorrow to Melbourne to take on Essendon.

Jason Weber:

Every day is a work day, yeah something like that what are you? Doing so. You go tomorrow. Were you playing Saturday.

Darren Burgess:

We play Saturday. Yeah so, we play Saturday. Yeah so we have our captain's run, just a light kick about tomorrow morning and then jump on a plane and we're playing at 1 o'clock or something, so it's a pretty early game.

Jason Weber:

Yeah, it's a nice short flight, High probability of success that flight.

Darren Burgess:

I hope so.

Jason Weber:

I've seen some duds coming out of Western Australia, that's for sure. Anyway, mate, a pleasure as always. I'm going to keep talking to you while I'm walking in the park. I think that's a good way to go for us in the future. Thank you for everyone for tolerating us for missing last week, but between a bit of work commitments from both of us, you just know we're on the tools, so if we're not talking, we're actually banging away somewhere trying to help. People know we're on the tools, so if we're not talking, we're we're actually banging away somewhere trying to help people, so I hope you guys got something out of it.

Darren Burgess:

We'll see you next time. Cheers, mate.