Hi, I’m Jarrad McVeigh and you might not believe it, but I love training. Everyone knows AFL players train hard, but not many people really know what we get up to each week so I’d like to give you some insight into what we do, and why we do it.
First of all, I love being out there on the track with the guys and trying to improve. For me, that’s one of the best parts of footy.
This year we have 13 new players at the club. It’s great to watch them and see what their strengths are so when we get into games next year, we know how they play.
It’s been a big pre-season here at the Swans. Because we didn’t play finals - and we were very annoyed about that - we have had longer to prepare for season 2010 and do everything we can to make sure we’re back playing in the finals next year.
The best thing about this pre-season is that pretty much everyone is training and will be ready to go for our first pre-season cup game, which is against Carlton at Blacktown on February 20.
We’ll actually have to fight for spots in the team which we’ve never had to do since I’ve been here!
And to prove how hard it’s been, it’s been good to see a few guys vomiting during sessions. It shows they are working hard and not saving themselves. That is a great part of what we’ve been doing, seeing guys pushed to the limit.
We started the pre-season in October with a month of running, no footballs at all. The fitness staff wanted us to really build-up our fitness base.
Now we’ve got the footballs out and have been doing plenty of skills sessions. But this year we’ve changed the way we do them and have introduced a lot of running, both during drills and in-between drills.
We’ll stop training and do a few one lap runs and then get back into training. It is designed to train under fatigue, and you need to have your voices up and talk and get your skills right for when you do play games and you are tired.
It is a lot different to when we used to do the skills session and then run afterwards. Our hardest session last week went for over three hours. We had a one km time trial, and then got straight into training with more running throughout the day.
Overall, we made a decision to change-up training quite a bit this year, to keep things fresh. So we’ve done a few different things like a biathlon, and then last Saturday we went kayaking at Rose Bay.
We had to paddle 750m into the harbour and then about another 750m to a beach and then we had some relays, and it’s fair to say some guys had no idea. Patty Veszpremi was a standout because he was so bad.
And he was in my group - along with Jude Bolton, Nick Malceski and Craig Bird - so it was no wonder we came last! We were 30 seconds behind after his leg of the relay, and we tried to get back but he’d given us too much of a handicap.
The best bit was when Patty fell off the kayak, jumped back in and tried to paddle but realised his paddle was five metres away, so he so he had to jump back off and then the canoe went away!
But it was a lot of fun. It was good for team morale but there was a fitness benefit too because you really had to work your upper body and the ab work was quite solid. And when we had the races it was flat out because you don’t want to lose …. I’ll just have to make sure Patty isn’t in my team next time we go kayaking!
This is our last week of training before we have a two week break for Christmas, but I’ll report back next week to give you an update before we get stuck into the Christmas turkey.
Jarrad
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