"She can't run" they said.
"She looks like a baby giraffe!" said her partner.
This is how one of the girls in my Women's Football Online Training Program was described last year during her first year of footy.
Coming from a roller derby background she was great at the crash and bash but her body had forgot how to run.
3 quarters of the way through the season she had to weeks off her feet from suffering shin splints.
She lost complete confidence in her body, the one thing that always had come through for her in past years.
This is how bad not being able to run properly can affect you, your body and your mind.
After contacting me at the end of last year we got to work on learning how to run again.
I suspect there's a lot of girls playing their first year of football suffering from this right now.
Just yesterday we had a call and she mentioned how she grabbed a loose ball and took off down the wing, even selling some candy on the way.
Poor running technique can lead to a host of lower body issues such as foot, ankle, knee, hip and lower back pain, calf strains, ligament knee injuries and foot/toe issues.
From a performance standpoint, the less efficiency you run with, the more work you'll need to put in to cover a given distance.
This results in greater fatigue and with greater fatigue comes a dramatic decrease in skill level and
further output for the rest of the game.
Coaches and players focus too much on the result and not how the result was achieved.
For example let's take a 2km time trial for example.
Player A gets 8mins30secs and Player B gets 10mins05secs.
Player A has a solid time but her knees cave in with each step, she has a lot of movement at the foot and ankle her arms and torso are moving around all over the place but be she can push herself quite well.
Player B although not having quite as good a time looks strong and tall for the most of her run. She has minimal movement through her foot, ankle and knee joints but as she is a bigger body then player A, she has far more mass to move.
So who would you take first on your team?
I'd take Player B.
Right now Player B shows far greater efficiency in her running pattern which means she'll be able to handle far more player losing then Player A, before an injury occurs, if it does.
In Melbourne right now there are 100's of new women's football teams embarking on their first year of football. Player numbers are a roller coaster with some teams having 20 more players then they need and others having 5 less players then thy need.
The teams struggling for numbers get affected by injuries a lot more then the teams with an overflow of players, making injury resiliency the NUMBER 1 battle to win for these clubs, even above skill level and game sense.
There's no skills or game sense to learn when you're on the sidelines.
Training your body to become injury resilient is also a huge part of game enjoyment. When you an avoid injury, you play more games and train more often.
When you play/train more often you get more time to practice the game sense and skills.
When you practice more you'll perform better in games.
When you, and your team perform better in games, player retention will be higher.
When player retention is high player attraction will improve as well.
As you can see the player experience pretty much comes down to keeping them on the park which is exactly the point of the Aussie Rules Women's Football Online Training Program is all about.
It's 3 main aspects is speed, strength and inefficiency.
And you can get all 3 of these things from just $15/week.
Read more about it and find out how to apply here.
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