JARRAD WAITE INJURY

North Melbourne forward Jarrad Waite is no stranger to injury.

If he ever got a solid run at it, in his heyday he could have been a top 10 player in the entire AFL but unfortunately luck has not been on his side.

He might have kicked a kitten 1 day I'm not sure.

Anyway he was being interviews on Triple M the other week and went into some pretty cool details about his injury.

Injury - Soleus muscle which lies just beneath the Gastrocnemius muscle (calf) and anytime it's a deep muscle, it seems a lot harder to rehab then the outer lying muscles.

Injury Time - he's already been out for 6 - 8 weeks with this injury

Soleus - it actually works a harder when you jog compared to when you run as the calf is involved in a lot of the toe off action which is as prevalent in jogging compared to running and sprinting.

GPS Information #1 - the 17 - 18km/hr mark, or at 4.7 - 5 meters per second, is when the soleus is at it's highest risk of reinjury as it's the upper end of the speed bracket for soleus work but it's not quire where the gastroc kicks in enough to support it. Because of this he worked up to doing sets of 120m @ 14kms/hr or 3.88 meters per second.

GPS Information #2 - To avoid the soleus critical point of 17 - 18kms/hr as mentioned above, the next step during his rehab was to increase his speed all the way up to 22kms/hr, or 6.1 meters per second, a decent jump in workload in one go.

GPS Information #3 - 22kms/hr was where he was up to when the interview was done about 2 weeks ago but the next critical point was when you hit 25kms/hr, or 6.94 meters per second, then your hamstrings start to kick in and you want to avoid overworking them too early and too much for fear of trying to fix problem, but end up making 2.

Some pretty cool stats there!