guru dumped

[Arthur Phat]

Interesting article. Larcom coaches Olympic Sprtiner Adam Basil and is in the new breed of guru AFL strength and conditioning dudes. Essendon who has John Quinn, probably the biggest strength and conditioning guru, has had a huge amount of soft tissue injuries. Surely there coaching methods can't be too different, but why the discrepetancty in soft tissue injuries (and don't say 'luck' - there's a good dozen or so sports injury journals)? Is the investment in a guru worth it, given both clubs performed similarly during the year?

Arthur

PS: on an unrelated issue Jonathon Brown getting off is a master stroke by the lawyers. Probably is good karma given they will give up a home preliminary final.

Larcom denies rift forced him to quit

MARK DUFFIELD

Fremantle fitness and conditioning coach Adam Larcom has resigned but maintains there was no confrontation with players over his training program.

Larcom, who quit the Dockers at the weekend, will return to Victoria to be closer to 11-year-old son Michael, work as a physiotherapist and complete a masters degree in biomechanics. He has not ruled out another role at a football club.

Larcom said he left the Dockers on good terms. He acknowledged that some players had asked that he cut down their training workload, but dismissed reports of an angry confrontation with senior players.

Larcom leaves the Dockers with probably the best soft tissue injury rate in the AFL. He was a confidant of coach Chris Connolly but said his role at the club had been greatly exaggerated by critics, in particular his part in Fremantle's much discussed player rotation.

Fremantle players (excluding rookies) missed seven weeks this season due to soft tissue injuries. The league average was 45 weeks.

"For the record, I want to say that I had no role in picking the team, I was not on the match committee. I had input into the fitness of players. The coach had the end say on it all. My role in rotations was that I sat on the bench," he said.

"We had a system with the midfield group to maintain their intensity during the game. I would give a message to Simon Eastaugh (assistant coach) who was in the box next to the coach and the coach would have the end say on everything."

Connolly hand-picked Larcom as Fremantle's fitness adviser. They worked together at Hawthorn before joining Fremantle at the end of 2001.

Larcom, a self-confessed perfectionist, described his fitness program as hard and regimented. He believed that it had served the club well but might have irked some players towards the end of his three year stint.

"It is like anything, I guess there are some players who may not like that approach," he said.

[injuryupdate]

I would agree that luck isn't the only factor that determines whether a club has a high or low soft tissue injury rate, but don't know whether many of the 'gurus', even those who successfully oversee programs that result in few injuries, would know the magical factors.

Knowing the risk factors for hamstring injuries, a young player list would definitely be an asset (which Fremantle has at the moment).

John Quinn was quoted in an article in the Australian at the start of the season as blaming the spate of Essendon hamstrings on pre-season training being shifted to a heavy ground on certain days which put the players' stride patterns out, and then 4 of them strained hamstrings when they returned to train on their regular ground. These 4 then went and continually restrained throughout the season (I think this is accurate reporting - unfortunately the article did not appear on the newspaper website).

I am a believer that weight training in the morning followed by sprint or heavy field training in the afternoon is dangerous, with doing weights after field sessions being much safer, but this is a guesstimate.

The Oslo group led by Roald Bahr believes that eccentric hamstring strengthening (Nordic or Russian exercises with partner holding down the kneeling athlete at the heels, who leans forward and tries to support himself as he falls further forward) is a very good way to prevent hamstring strains.

Some further discussion on this topic:

http://injuryupdate.com.au/images/research/hamstringprevention.pdf

http://www.injuryupdate.com.au/JSMSBlightedit.pdf

[Bill S. Preston-Esquire]

Bohdan Babechjuk (something like that) just got the flick from Hawthorn. NOt sure what their injury rate was like but they were pretty woeful on field.

[injuryupdate]

Bohdan Babechjuk (something like that) just got the flick from Hawthorn. NOt sure what their injury rate was like but they were pretty woeful on field.

Maybe this is not harsh enough, but I don't think from the outside you can generally criticise medical and conditioning staff and their role within a team. If a team consistently does well with their injury management outcomes (e.g. injury rates, return to play successes etc.) then you can presume that the doctor, physiotherapist, conditioners etc. are all doing a pretty good job.

When things go wrong (e.g. high injury rates at a club) it is very difficult from the outside (and probably the inside) to point the finger. Training programs, medical decisions, player list (often too old or too injury prone), coaches' attitudes to injury, training and home ground playing surface etc. plus the ever present luck factor can all impact on a team's results.

It is a fact of professional football that when a team hits rock bottom that people will make way. Some of these decisions in hindsight may prove to be right, whereas in other cases the people on the receiving end may go elsewhere and prove that they were more capable than those judging them thought.