ROSS Lyon believes his 2015 Fremantle squad is entering the season in the best shape of any team he has coached in his nine years with both the Dockers and before that with St Kilda.
Lyon has ditched the Monday to Friday pre-season training regimen, giving his players a break every Thursday and replacing it instead with a Saturday morning running session.
The result has been his players are fresh throughout the week, have more miles in their legs and have been able to complete more skills work and match simulation activities.
Add the extra fortnight of training because of the delayed start to the season due to the cricket World Cup and Lyon expects this team to be his best prepared yet.
"Our players have really enjoyed it," he told AFL.com.au. "It enables us to get an extra day of running in that we haven’t done."
"We’ve got a greater volume of work at a higher intensity and it has enabled us to do more game sense training decision making and competing."
Lyon estimated that because his players are fitter and fresher and because of the extended pre-season campaign, they have had the equivalent of five extra weeks of training.
Because footballers don't get weekends off during the season, Lyon had until now been keen to give his players a break on Saturdays and Sundays as a nod to work-life balance.
But he also noted that their pre-season work had been more sluggish as the week went on. The usual dressing-room banter would die down the longer the week progressed.
That has changed markedly this year and what has also pleased the fourth-year Fremantle coach is the condition in which his players returned to pre-season training before Christmas.
"If they come back in poor condition you have to use that time to condition them; you can't go from zero to 100, there’s a graduation period to get to the stage you want them to," he said.
"What I have learned is that you have to come back in good shape, and we have got into our game sense activity a lot quicker than we have in the past and that's a credit to our players who came back in a condition that allows that to happen.
"We’ve done more competitive work than we have ever done in the history of my coaching. It is more specific to my game plan and style of coaching."
