Aussie Rules Training

These notes come from what I’m pretty sure was a Twitter thread from soccer coach developer Gary Piggott. It provides a very clear and concise picture of what coaches should be taking into account before each training session and when planning to introduce new playing concepts to their teams. WHAT x have a clear learning...

“Bad kicking is bad football” Considering the sport is called football, it’s safe to assume that kicking is a rather important part of the game so when, how and who you kick to does indeed have a mammoth baring on game results. There is nowhere near enough focus on improving kicking at community level and...

You’re knee deep in running at training with lactate being produced faster then it can be utilised and you’re just finding any old way to get through until the end. You hunch over and put your hands on your knees, an unconscious action you didn’t purposefully think of, but just did anyway. The coach yells...

Here’s another AFL-specific study looking at how long you let training activities run based on a umber of factors. Most of the time we see activities run for too long and the players lose interest,which us coaches see as “a drop in talk” – if there was something interesting to talk about then they would...

All cone-to cone drills can completely die off for me but there’s 3 in particular that I still see constantly and that’s lanework, 5 star handball and triangle kick. I mean if I have to do these again then I’ll just flat out refuse – it’s lazy training design and it’s lazy coaching. At local/amateur...

I’ve got a bunch of AFL-based studies from this year that provides great statistical insight into the inner workings of training and games that you can use to base your own training game plans around. Today we look at representative learning which refers to how much your training includes literal game information and this study...

North Melbourne were just far more superior over the weekend, not even giving the Lions a sniff of a sniff! Hopefully teams go to work on what North do and how they do it and we get a more aesthetically pleasing product in the years to come, after a drop in quality this season. In...

For season 2025, I”ll be taking the reigns of Head Coach for the Senior Women at Reservoir Football Club, a team being re-booted after falling away during Covid, as many teams did. Avid reader’s of this blog are well aware of the game analysis I do for each and every round of AFLW that looks...

Both of my Grand Finals predicted teams made it through over the weekend in similar ways but in very different games. North Melbourne put the foot down from the very onset with 4 goals in a blink of an eye where the Lions had to wait until the 3rd quarter before they were able to...