G’day Tiger Army. Day 3 of camp has been completed. A day of physical intensity mixed with mindfulness, laughter and stories.

We commenced with breakfast. You might think that’s normal and unremarkable, but when you’re travelling with a high performance team such as ours, our meals and snacks are controlled by the Club dietitian across the day to ensure the maximum benefit to the team during an intense training block. Breakfast often consists of gluten-free cereals, fruit, poached eggs with baked beans and avocado on toast. Snacks will vary depending on the type of training session, but with a gym session they are generally protein bars, fruit, Up and Go milk and muesli bars. I always have bags of snakes and jelly babies available for the players on my bus. Please don’t tell the Club dietitian but they are the 25% less sugar variety, and they disappear very quickly!

Anyway, after breakfast we drove down to the Bond University Sport Institute for a two-rotation session of weights and Richmond Man. I sat in on the Richmond Man session for the forwards, which was facilitated by Shane McCurry, Ivan Maric and Player Welfare Manager Nadine Haider. As always, I find these sessions incredibly interesting and stimulating. As in recent years, the players and football department staff are compiling individual story books of the season. It’s hard to explain in a paragraph or two, but the alignment of the physical and the mental throughout the Club, in everything we do, is very strong.

I didn’t do any weights as, quite frankly, it would be embarrassing.

After lunch, we held a fun team activity officially called Bubble Soccer. With a group of extremely competitive, high-performing athletes, it’s fair to describe the activity as hilarious and risk-managed violence with an occasional game breaking out. The coach still has the competitive streak from his playing days, and was seen inflicting high-velocity padded bumps to players, before retribution was administered by N Vlastuin and D Martin in particular, and the coach was seen somersaulting through the air with his sizeable calves flailing from the padded suit. Officially the Black team won, no doubt energised by the lolly supply on the bus!

Then we recovered with a pool session with the Club’s Breathing Coach, Nam Baldwin. Nam has been working with the Club for over a year now. Adopting proper and effective breathing techniques can and has impacted on-field performance both physically and mentally. Again an incredibly interesting session that aligns and complements all other aspects of our high performance program. Each day, the players practise their breathing techniques, and often listen to personalised breathing and mindfulness podcasts produced by Nam.

Finally, over dinner, we participated in the first Match Committee meeting of the coaching group for the 2020 season, with an eye on selecting the team for Round 1. Three groups selected their teams then “pitched” them to the coaching group. Our team had three changes from the 2019 Grand Final team. And I’m not disclosing what they were!

Overall, another incredibly interesting day.

Andrew is a proud 2020 Richmond Executive member – Click here to find out more about corporate and coterie experiences.