Essendon fans may not have to wait too much longer to see Zach Merrett and Jake Stringer return to the side, with both making great strides in their returns from syndesmosis and hamstring injuries respectively.

Merrett, who suffered a syndesmosis injury in the Bombers’ round two loss to Brisbane, has made a series of positive progressions to the point where he will begin to begin on-track work just four weeks after his surgery.

Head of high performance Sean Murphy said the 26-year-old's trajectory to returning to play was highly promising.

“‘Junior’ (Merrett) is going really well,” Murphy told Essendon’s Liberty Financial Performance Update.

“The settling after that surgery is the most important part and he’s in a really good spot. He’s up running, starting some offline (agility) work this week and we’ll see him sooner rather than later, but it’s all going well for him and he’s ticking off all the markers that we need.”

Midfielder-forward Stringer is also putting his best foot forward for a return to playing as he progresses from a hamstring strain.

Murphy said Stringer had built a solid running base and will now just need to progress through speed-work to ensure he is fully fit to play.

“'String' is going really well,” Murphy said.

“He’s ticking off all the markers along the way and all of those strength markers are going really well.

“He’s been in a solid training block in terms of just the volume of running, the last bit to come now is just the speed and we’ll introduce that across this week and keep progressing.”

Ruckman Andrew Phillips will unfortunately miss two games following an innocuous hamstring strain.

Phillips sustained the injury at the opening bounce of Sunday's loss to Fremantle, but will hopefully build his running back up quickly due to the slight nature of the injury.

“A challenging one for ‘Flip’ (which occurred) at the start of the game,” Murphy said.

“He came to the bench, we looked at it, and thought we might be able to keep him going, and unfortunately we weren’t able to do that and had to sub him out of the game.

“It’s a really low-grade hamstring strain and he’ll most likely miss a couple of weeks. He’ll get running quickly, get some volume into his legs and build up the speed over the back end of the week.”

Murphy also touched on injury updates to Will Snelling, Kyle Langford and James Stewart, while highlighting impressive running efforts from Mason Redman and Jake Kelly.

Watch the round six Liberty Financial Performance Update below.

INJURY LIST - RD 6