The AFL off-season can be just as important for keeping match fit than the season itself. It’s the time of year where passionate players can dedicate the early months of the year to ensuring their bodies and skills are optimised in anticipation for the season to come.
But your body is susceptible to incurring a pre-season injury that could either throw out some of your footy year or ruin it completely. As such, it’s important to ease back into training and ensure that you start lightly before working your way up to the more intense workouts.
With this in mind, here are a few imperative tips for preventing a potentially-devastating pre-season footy injury:
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1.Take a break
Before you go grabbing your favourite training merch from Collingwood, Essendon or Geelong Football Club shop, it’s imperative that you take a proper rest before you get back onto the pitch. After all, you’ve likely just experienced a gruelling winter season whether you played in the finals or not.
Players always need time to rest and recover from a tough season of heavy hitouts and you are likely no exception. So, tip one for preventing an off-season injury is this: give yourself a couple of weeks to kick back and chill before getting back onto the field or into the gym!
2.Work on strength
Strength training is imperative to optimising your gameplay. It gives you an awesome advantage over your opponent that will make it difficult for them to out-muscle you when it comes to winning the ball. Strength is one of the key elements to any top player’s game and should be a prime focus in the off-season.
But it’s also imperative for pre-season injury prevention. After all, a stronger body is one that is less susceptible to pre-season injury, especially if you are working your muscles through exercises like box squats, deadlifts, dumbbells, hip-thrusts, rowing exercises and more.
3.Endurance is also key
A player who can keep up with pre-season training is also one that is likely to get injured before the season actually starts. This is because they can handle the moderate-to-gruelling exercises many coaches like to put their players through before the season’s opening bounce. And, believe us, coaches do tend to put their afl players through rigorous pre-season training to see who is up for the year ahead.
So, be sure to work on your endurance during your pre-pre-season training. Through cardio exercises like cycling, jogging, running and swimming, you will build up a physical endurance that will not only impress the coach in pre-season training, but will also ensure that you can keep up with the rigours such training provides!
4.Don’t rush into the hard stuff
Pre-season training with the club is when the workouts become rigorous endeavours to test your mettle for the season ahead. Therefore, you shouldn’t overexert yourself before club training actually begins. Start by taking it lightly after your break – your body still needs time to ease into strenuous training despite the time you took for a rest.
You can then start to ease your way up to harder training that will prep you for the club stuff. For example, you might start by running five Ks on the treadmill at a medium pace. After a week, you can take it up to 10 Ks, and even pick up the pace until you are back to the sports level you were at during the previous footy season.
These essential tips will help stave off pre-season injuries whilst prepping your body for the rigorous training that comes before the opening bounce of the year!
