Over the first 3 rounds, AFL footy has undertaken very noticeable changes in how the game isa currently being played.
Whether this will hold is not entirely clear but the rules have been altered to do so at some level and a good amount of player damage has already been done with an extremely high risk of secondary occurrences of hamstring injuries after the initial one - poor Callum Ah Chee is on his 3rd since Xmas already! (cue the image from Useless AFL Stats!)
The talk of the game dramatically speeding up, the early start to the season and players not having enough pre-season training time are all a big part of this discussion and will be part of the solution - if the AFL wants one.
For a multi-faceted sport like Aussie Rules, it needs to be looked at through a multi-faceted lens.
I like to use the 4 co-actives of performance to do this:
- Tactical
- Physical
- Technical
- Psychological
Tactically, we can clearly see the shift in play with a lot less stoppages and more continuous play.
This tactical shift can have an effect on the physical co-active as with more high-speed running comes more fatigue - low/medium speed running won't really shift fatigue markers in elite athletes.
The next flow-on effect is to the technical co-active as with fatigue comes sub-optimal movement patterns and players can overreach from less-then-stella positions.
But what about the psychological co-active?
Why has this not been mentioned at all?
It's definitely a black hole in daily media reporting as it's not visible and cannot be tracked by Champion Data and alike.
Enter Cognitive Overload.
Cognitive Overload occurs when a players' working memory gets overflowed by information from the environment which occurs in high pressure situations with great consequences.
In 2026 the game is far more open with tackles, clearances, ruck contests, ball up/throw ins, repeat stoppages all down with disposals, meters gained, marks all up.
More open play = More information to process = Less time to decide and execute in
Less stops in play = Less in-game rest = More high-speed running under relative fatigue
Cognitive Overload is definitely playing a part in this as well and couple that with dual tasking (performing multiple tasks at once) and attention can be pulled in too many directions, adding to this cognitive overload even more.
The simplest way I can describe cognitive overload in terms is through practice games and/or round 1.
Practive games are the hardest games from a physical standpoint as it's usually your first bout of continuous contact and has far closer game-simulated running then any training game can have.
You can do all the running you want but it doesn't compare you for the contact and 3 - 4 decent tackles can take the stuffing right out of you.
Round 1 is different all together and although you've had the contact in the practice games, what you haven't had is the extreme level of arousal and this another major component to cognitive overload and is why it seems you haven't even trained once 7 - 10mins into the 1st quarter of the 1st game.
Even AFL teams struggle with this as players are always saying practice games aren't even close to the real stuff, much like training game-sim isn't even close to the practice games.
There's a lot of focus on running loads and the like and I don't know if they do already but if they don't, then AFL teams should try looking at interaction load and how many at the ball, near the ball and far away from the ball decisions are made by players and try simulating that at training along with the running demands they already know about.
Soccer has some software around this sort of thing I believe, and I'd be surprised if something similar wasn't being used in the AFL to some degree.
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