VIDEO: Tigers to step up in pre-season
Richmond’s Elite Performance Manager, Peter Burge talks about the upcoming preseason:
http://www.afl.com.au/video?guid=597009Summary:* It's been a long break but everyone have been doing their programs. We've certainly got some work installed for them and they experienced that yesterday with their first day back which is good.
* Pre-Christmas will be more fitness based, with an individual skills focus. Given it’s a young group, there still is a pretty heavy emphasis on conditioning. We have to step up to some new levels with some of our guys, and they’ve got to set themselves some high standards with their conditioning.
* Everyone has an individual focus. With the football side of things, their football stuff gets broken down into the areas they need to improve on, and it’s the same with the conditioning. So those that need to do more strength work will do that while those that need a more conditioning focus will do that.
* When all the older boys get back, the program will progress. It won’t change too much, but it’ll probably just get harder. It will be a pretty solid pre-Christmas period. Last year, with a new program, they experienced about 80% of the program's capacity and being a new program I didn't want to tip them over the edge. But now that I know them and they understand the program, we'll be able to step it up and take them to some new levels.
* Increasing the program is increasing the duration or intensity, number of reps, that sort of stuff. So now we've got some good information on the guys and where they sit physically, we can look to build on that and set some new targets which we will achieve.
* This year we're going to stay in Melbourne and not have a preseason camp. Given the AFL pre-season is a little bit shorter due to the earlier start of the season, we're going to do it all at home and with our new facilities - we haven't been on the ground for not even 12 months - it's all fairly new and we feel we don't need to go anywhere to get that training. So we'll do that here and prepare in Melbourne.
* Right now we have 18 players back and only four of those are in rehab and really a few of them are only short term; should be back with the main group in 2-3 weeks. Over the whole list we are looking better than last year - we started with 13 guys in rehab last year; this year it's probably around 10 and really only two of those need a little bit longer; they're expected to go to around Christmas. So we feel we are in a pretty good position [ed. touchwood].
