Luke

We will be beaten up physically and on the scoreboard versus North next week. Brown will kick at least four and we will be subject to media scrutiny due to our paltry tackle count. I hope I'm proven wrong.

To Collingwood I say, "Weideman weep."

We have to go for him. I liken Paul Roos to NBA coaching legend Phil Jackson, who won a bunch of championships with "personalities" like Dennis Rodman, Shaq and Kobe on his teams. He dealt with them by letting them be themselves- he didn't set stupid "team rules" and expect them to be robots. The players appreciated it and repaid it by towing the line.

Does anyone have a link to this episode?

I'd love to know more about this word, and your thoughts on Matt Burgan.

My post wasn't meant as a critism of Misson. Though I reckon he himself could use a bit of tapering before his DeeTV interviews. Very flat performances...

I'm of the belief that playing a full game each week should maintain the fitness level achieved during the preseason, and that in-season training should be limited to skills, speed work, and recovery. Perhaps the over-training with a view to reaping the benefits in the future is Misson's plan, and would concur with his 3-year estimate.

Hello everyone, Long time lurker, first time poster. I have a theory about the Dees performance woes, gleaned from my background in elite swimming. I wasn't elite but I certainly trained at that level, in a squad with Olympic medalists and under the tutelage of an Australian national coach. None of this will be Earth-shattering, and Roosy touched on it in his press conference. Its just an insight into something I dont think the footy world understands very well. Think about Dom Tyson early 2014. Limited pre-season. Huge start to the year, diminishing returns as it progressed. Now in 2015, despite a full pre-season, his performance aint amazing. Hes not alone: Chris Dawes, JKH, the list goes on. Its a very obvious trend. In swimming, wed train 11 months of the year. The focus was on an annual competition, namely the Australian Championships. Youd spend the entire year preparing for that one week of racing. Other competitions would come up along the way, but your training was focussed on that one comp. The training program would go through phases. The year would start with long, low-intensity swimming. As in, 100 km weeks. That would last perhaps three months. The next phase would be more intense- fewer kilometres but bloody hard. This phase would take up the majority of the year, perhaps 7 months. At this point, swimmers are constantly worn-out and have little in the way of speed. Racing during these periods would always produce poor results, and that was expected. Then, a month out of competition, youd start to taper. And thats what I want to talk about. Tapering is reducing training loads for recovery ahead of the competition. Its also a time when you build up your speed with short-distant sprint training. Tapering is a delicate thing. Its really personal for each individual athlete, depending on their body makeup and the nature of their specialist events (eg. a 100m sprinter should taper differently to a 1500m swimmer). Its really easy for an athlete and his/her coach to bugger up the taper. For instance, nearly everyone would have a month off after Nationals, but there was a semi-serious competition (a trial to get on a state team- so important in that sense) which was (oddly) scheduled about three weeks into that month off. Everyone would compete having not swam at all for three weeks. It was common for people to shatter their best times during that competition, meaning their coach had bungled the taper for Nationals in a major way. Duncan Armstrong once came and spoke at our club, and he detailed his preparation for his 1988 Gold-medal Olympic campaign. The bloke had a preparation for something like two-and-half-years, without taper. Perhaps it was between the 1986 Commonwealth Games and the Olympic trials in 88, so two years. During that preparation, he raced without tapering, and produced results so bad that many people asked him if he was even going to compete in the Olympic trials. Its my belief that the Melbourne Demons are currently stuck at exactly that point. Overtrained, exhausted, and not at all ready to perform. Obviously, swimming training with one important, week-long competition per year is very different to training for a six-month footy season, but the Dees fitness management needs to be looked at seriously. Perhaps, ideally, youd have a list full of AFL-ready players, who could cycle through different stages of taper at different times and be swapped in and out on that basis. And were a long way off having that kind of depth. Perhaps the Melbourne fitness staff know that the payoff for tapering our athletes for peak performance now, wont yield the returns that it will when the young list matures over the next few years, and theyre keeping the players in that Duncan Armstrong taperless period. Or perhaps Australian Rules Football doesnt quite draw the world-class, high-performance managers that the impressive job titles claim they are. Regardless, I think what youre seeing is a lot of over-trained players with no speed and explosiveness, who are performing at their best only after periods of injury-induced rest. On a positive note, when Duncan Armstrong finally did give himself some time to recover and build some speed and explosiveness, he swam a world record despite going into the Olympics ranked number 46 in the world. Maybe thatll be us in a couple of years. Go Dees. Luke