A trio of first to fourth year Cats have hit the ground running, producing personal best running performances to kick start their 2019 campaigns.
Mark O’Connor, Charlie Constable, and Gryan Miers all recorded personal bests in the club’s 1.2km shuttle run.
Assistant coach Matthew Scarlett was quick to praise O’Connor for the shape in which he has returned to the club.
“He’s a professional – he’s one of our best runners and he’s in really good shape,” Scarlett said.
“It’s great to see guys have gone away and improved parts of their game over the break."
The shuttle run, together with a 15-minute run, comprise the two major aerobic tests the players are subjected to upon their return to the club.
Physical performance manager Scott Murphy took Cats Media through what both tests entail.
15-minute run
“The foundation running test that we do would be the 15-minute run,” Murphy said.
“They run as far as they can in 15 minutes and we’ve been doing that for four years now.”
“We’ve got some very, very good runners in the team like Mark Blicavs, Sam Menegola and Gryan Miers who was a good recruit last year. "
The test is used to benchmark the players against their own previous times.
“It favours the smaller, running type athletes heavily,” Murphy says.
“Tom Hawkins – it’s not his favourite 15 minutes of his life. He still has a level that we know he should be at and if he’s there we’re pretty happy.
James Pasons navigates the Shuttle Run.
Shuttle Run
The shuttle run adds some changes of direction into the mix and the players run upwards and backwards between set distances.
We do a 1.2km shuttle which is a nice indication of whether you’ve done a little bit of work,” Murphy said.
“It takes into account whether you are conditioned to change direction – so whether you have done some leg strength.”
“If someone came back and they were particularly poor in the shuttle – that sets off alarm bells as they’re probably not going to handle the multi-directional nature of footy, because they haven’t had that preparation.”
“In my 20-odd years of doing this there’s always ups and downs. You will have some people that come back very well and some people that come back very poorly. The majority tend to sit in and around the level of expectation.”
