We all understand rugby league players have to be fit to play the sport. But fitness also includes being free from injury.
As a game, we are clamping down on concussions via the attempted elimination of high-shots. Yet what of injuries below the neck? Do they not matter?
Unfortunately, I know of too many ex-players in their thirties or forties who need hip or shoulder replacements, neck surgery and so many other things.
I know many teenagers and players in their twenties who've had more operations than mere-mortals have in a lifetime.
Anybody who has had a physical injury or pain for an extended period of time knows that, after a while, it impacts them mentally, too.
According to the NRL website this week, there are 90 players out injured from the NRL right now.
That means each club has an average of five players on the sidelines.
In reality, many teams have more than that. St George Illawarra, for example, currently have twelve players listed as sidelined. That's nearly a full side!
This isn't an ‘end of season' phenomenon either. NRL injuries start to mount up after the first round, each year, without fail.
Something I do each year is check the injury lists after four rounds, as I believe we are leaving this element of player welfare far behind.
As far back as 2019 I started to monitor and campaign against, this issue. Unfortunately, when I raise my concerns, either on my podcast or my social media channels, most people don't seem to agree with me and just reply with words to the effect that ‘it's part and parcel of a tough game'.
Early in season 2019, an average of 17.5 players a week were getting injured in the NRL. It has stayed around a similar figure every year since then.
17.5 is more than a whole game day squad. Even the 2020 season saw 28 players sidelined after two rounds, before it was aborted due to COVID concerns!
It's time for coaches, as well as strength & conditioners in the NRL (and other high-level leagues) to take a step back and have a huge rethink about what is ‘normal' in rugby league training.
We need to have a deep, deep think about the human impact our training methods are having.
A couple of lawsuits against clubs don't seem to be stemming the tide.
Former Sea Eagles player Lloyd Perrett has filed a lawsuit against his old employer, claiming his career was cut short due to an "outlandish training regime".
Former Bulldogs player Jackson Topine is suing his former club, alleging he suffered ‘psychiatric injury' and ‘physical and mental impairment' due to a training punishment.
I don't think it's enough to say ‘the game is more brutal than ever' and leave it at that.
The game is more brutal than ever because the training is more brutal than ever. There's also more of it than ever.
When it comes to how to deal with full-time professional training, we are relative newcomers to it, in terms of the evolution of the sport.
It came in for most clubs in the early-to-mid 1990's. So, therefore, it's a three decades old concept in rugby league.
Even the great Phil ‘Gus' Gould suggested in his own podcast earlier this year, that the game was still learning how to be fulltime professionals as recently as a decade ago.
I'd say they still have plenty of learning to do!
When fulltime training first arrived, it seemed that some clubs took the opportunity to train their players for as many hours as possible, until they realised the diminishing-returns they were (not) enjoying.
Clubs are still keen to use their full-time players as much as possible during the week.
The job of staff at each club is to prepare their players for what they are about to face each weekend. Surely, the injury stats point to the fact that we are missing something somewhere in this constant quest for personal bests in the gym and in the cardio and sprint sessions?
Every year, there is not one club who is anything near full strength after four rounds. After two rounds each year, we will be lucky if one or two teams are.
How many of these injuries occur because players are too tired, or technically deficient and putting their heads, limbs and digits in the wrong place in the heat of battle?
How many are carrying a physique too heavy for what their bodies can naturally cope with and are therefore prone to collapse on their knees or ankles under duress?
How much do we truly know in the fulltime game about what damage we are doing to our players?
I know of one NRL player who regularly goes straight to bed when he gets home from a pre-season session and has been known to sleep all day and night until his next session the day after. He says his exhaustion levels are beyond anything he has ever encountered.
The pectoral tear is a relatively common injury now, compared to days of old; a legacy of weight training regimes that are not meant for preparing wrestlers. We send the people we have (otherwise) prepared like wrestlers into extremely high-impact collisions with opposition players, who also attempt to wrestle them into a pretzel shape.
There's also been an explosion of knee operations for talented juniors and those coming through the ranks.
One very high-profile player I coached as a junior, went to an NRL club as soon as he left school. In a couple of years, I predict he put on about 15-20kg of weight very quickly. I couldn't believe the size of him when I saw him making his NRL debut.
He busted his knee in no time at all, and I have no doubt the big reason was that the club piled weight on his frame far too quickly.
I have plenty of experience of injury management from my own coaching career. Many of the environments I have been in control of essentially duplicated full time, professional training models.
The competitions I prepared these players for was also a rather intense affair.
With a focus on player welfare, ‘less is more' and a favourite phrase of mine ‘the slower we go the faster we will get there', we often managed to get the injuries down to one or two a season and still enjoyed success on the field.
Granted, this wasn't the NRL I was preparing teams for, but in relative terms, it was as tough as it got for those players at this time in their lives and many have gone on to play in the NRL.
The keys to avoiding injury included charting all work as it happened and putting in lots of effort into predicting when injuries were more likely to occur.
Unless the work is of a super low-intensity, I have always decreed that players should spend no more than seventy minutes on the training field, partaking in what we might consider serious training sessions, any given day.
Another significant training approach is to ensure all practice is game specific, down to significant detail.
Strength training has to be functional and specific for rugby league (not body building). Gym sessions should also be strictly time limited and of a manageable frequency.
Injury prevention requires focus on and area that I see needs a lot more attention at many NRL clubs; technique.
Each player should regularly receive one-on-one video review with huge focus on technique in tackles and collisions. And the opportunity to fix it.
We've seen and heard enough over the years to know that some players at the top level are being trained too hard and not in a way that totally correlates to the game. There are also countless examples of techniques in collision going wrong. Can we blame it all on the speed of the game?
There seems to be an increase in blow out score lines or high scoring matches in the NRL seasons of the last year or two.
The sports' obsession with speeding things up means that the whole ‘momentum' of a game can be so hard to turn around for slightly weaker sides or the team that doesn't start well.
Alternatively, a stronger team does bounce back, a combination of their own re-attention to task but also a legacy of the opposition running out gas themselves.
I am sure we would all rather see some attritional battles, than games that blow out or have similar scorelines to basketball contests?
Soccer gets criticised for it's nil-nil scorelines, basketball fans enjoy points constantly, yet a strength of our game is there have often been the ‘right amount' of scoring moments in any given game; the right balance between anticipation and release of joy or frustration.
By rounds seven and eight, teams that have several in the physio room or less depth in their squad really start to struggle with the weekly grind of games.
Some teams who are poor just struggle even more
.
As a result, teams have been pushing the limits of sports science to meet those demands.
If you wonder why your team looks like world beaters one week then gets smashed a week later, this can go some way to explaining why.
As too can the flights and the turnarounds. Many Australian based teams are backing up on Thursday's and Friday's after flying to New Zealand five-days before. We will have Perth to contend with soon, too.
Even the NRL Physio online has been quoted as saying that what clubs are doing these days “isn't working”.
I can't understand why there is not more done to stop every club treatment room reflecting a M.A.S.H unit. It happens every year without fail.
The search for the extra 1 per cent has tipped over the players over the edge, we are at the point of diminishing returns.
We want to see our talent on the field.
We need to act now. For player safety, human sanity and for the benefit of the sport as a whole.
Lee Addison is a former club coach at Sea Eagles and Panthers and the founder of rugbyleaguecoach.com.au. His recently published book ‘Rugby League Coach' is available now on Amazon and www.rugbyleaguecoach.com.au
