Difference is all the NRL and AFL Teams are on a level playing field, and they know what’s ahead of them. We’re trying to take down the best nations in the world in our sport and that kind of requires a strategy. It might not be the strategy you’d take, but god help us if you’re ever in charge
Firstly, you're safe in the knowledge that I'll never be in charge. But nobody on this thread, including you, have provided any empircal evidence from any study that having a weekend off in March is going to improve performance in October. Bearing in mind that the competition is barely 6 weeks old and they've already had a bye, with another one coming up in two weeks.
None of this means that I'm against workload management and the periodisation of training, which are obviously necessary in any team sport that has a long season. But is resting players from matches really workload management? Will missing matches reduce injury or is the the type, intesity and nature of the training which should be managed and periodised? How will a Friday off on the 29th of March help players be at peak performance for a tournament in October/November?
Answer these questions with evidence and I'll be more than happy to concede.
My bold
Risk management is the overall process of identifying, assessing, and controlling risks. Relative to sport, this process is not possible without quantifying the incidence and severity of injuries, as well as associated risk factors and mechanisms. One important factor in that regard is to monitor training load. Recently, the relationship between training load and injuries in sport has been discussed. Challenging the dogma that high training loads cause high injury rates, many studies across a range of sports have shown that excellent fitness reduces injury risk. Well-structured intensive training can have protective effects against noncontact soft-tissue injuries. On the other hand, undertraining has also been related to increased injury risk.
https://journals.humankinetics.com/doi/pdf/10.1123/ijspp.2016-0207
And another study:
Specifically, restricting workloads and thereby reducing the stimulus for adaptation and perhaps also the opportunity for technical development may have paradoxically
reduced players’ level of preparedness and compromised their resilience to the rigours of competition when these players progress to elite senior level. Similarly, other authors have raised the question of whether the practice of imposing enforced rest creates a sporadic pattern of loading that may be poorly tolerated by players, once more
serving to increase injury risk rather than reducing it. The suggestion is that athletes respond much better to a relatively consistent level of loading, and so the large fluctuations in daily and weekly workloads that occur with
enforced rest and player rotation may be an indirect cause of the injuries observed.
A similar study of professional rugby union in the United Kingdom reported that gross measures of weekly training volume (number of hours per week), based on questionnaires completed by the staff at each respective club, showed
no statistical relationship with the number of injuries sustained by players during training or matches.4 Despite the lack of apparent association with rate of injury based on the data presented, the authors nevertheless recommended modifying the overall volume and content of training (specifically reducing the hours spent in activities associated with relatively higher injury rates, such as contact training), in order to reduce the severity of injuries.
https://www.researchgate.net/public...imply_Restricting_Workloads_Really_the_Answer
