David Buttifant Seminar Recap

Last Sunday I attended a Centrality based seminar by Collingwood's Director of Sports Science, David Buttifant and Anthony Rocca, titled "How to Win You Own Personal Premiership."

I wasn't sure what the seminar was going to entail but I was going to attend regardless although I was hoping for something more training based in hind-site.

The event overview was:

David

How to Plan Your Way to Success

How to Succeed Where Others Fail

Anthony

Overcoming and Thriving Through Adversity

David

How to Recover From Injuries Like an AFL Footballer

Panel Discussion

Instead of going into too much detail I'll just dot point my notes:

• failing to plan is planing to fail
• train slow, be slow
• it's a lot harder to increase an endurance dominant player's explosiveness then to increase an endurance dominant player's explosiveness
• The best players have an excellent explosive profile
• Collingwood don't do any long distance running except for their 2km time trial instead opting for game simulated training like 4 v 5, 3 v 3, 2 v 3 games
• players average 12 - 16kms/game
• the point of training is to minimise the distance covered, thus training stress but reaping the optimal training effect
• a daily set up at this time of the year consists of 15 - 30mins core work for the younger players and whoever needs it, 45 - 90mins of weights breaking players into groups depending on goals and abilities, refuel with supplements, miscellaneous conditioning such as sprinting technique, boxing etc and lastly range of motion wok and restoration
• when planning your training progress intensity from easy to hard and progress skills simple to complex
• power is tested every 2 - 6 weeks on a smith machine which is hooked up to some contraption - i missed what is was
• range of motion is tested weekly
• skin folds are tested every 2 weeks for those who come back a little heavier then they should
• uses the Sandwich Approach to feedback which a positive comment followed by a negative followed by a positive comment
• recovery methods they use include ice bath with mobilisation, whole body vibration, massage, sleep, proprioception, body flow, autogenics and supplementation
• ice baths increase growth hormone and thus protein synthesis
• vibration training decreases potentiation where glute activation increase potentiation so vibration may be best served for power endurance while it also increases somastatin and decreases myostatin which in turn decreases growth hormone
• mostly uses trigger point massage which provides its greatest benefits when performed 48 - 72hrs game
• advocates mediation which decreases hear rate, cortisol and ventilation and actually does 2 x 10min sessions/day himself
• doses creatine for 10g max
• pre weights have 5 - 15g protein to decrease muscle degradation during training
• supplements zinc and magnesium
• protein is set at 1.5 - 1.8g per kg of body weight/day
• has the team do weights the day after a game
• in a shocker to me, he has only included glute activation for the team recently which means he could have maybe saved Nathan Buckley if he had done it earlier as the team physio had been bugging him about it for a while
• according to teams GPS readings, the top 4 teams do less work then the bottom 4 teams but get better results
• uses a daily recovery index which tracks sleep, energy, mental state, range of motion, soreness and recovery with each being marked out of ten and if you average a 6 or under on any given day then you need to reassess
• allows 50g of fat/day max
• measures creatine kinase which increases with training load and finds that the younger players average a higher reading and questions the training loads of some of the under age teams which is why they deload the younger players more often

Overall I still enjoyed the seminar and David also mentioned that Centrality and himself were maybe going to some more specific seminars in the future too.