The professionalism of top level football has come a long way in recent years. Gone are the days of arriving for training every Tuesday and Thursday before playing on a Saturday afternoon. Once upon a time players would basically fit in training around work commitments. But modern football is a very different environment - training revolves around sprint sessions, weight sessions and skills sessions. Skills such as balance, co-ordination and agility are now an integral part of every club's approach. And modern training methods also go in cycles - an idea designed to ensure that players peak at the right times. We spoke to Essendon fitness coach John Quinn about this training method.

""There are times during the year when we will do more physically than we will at other times during the season and that is something that all clubs do,"" Quinn said. ""One of the major reasons is injury prevention. You simply can't push athletes for 22 weeks straight. You end up with a list of fatigued footballers who are more prone to soft tissue injuries.""

It is a method that is used in a number of other sports. Horse trainers don't race their stable stars 12 months of the year - they send them to the paddock for a freshen up every now and again. And so it is with the star athletes - they only race at certain stages during the year and arrange their training to ensure they are peaking at the right time.

""The workload at training isn't markedly different from what they would normally do but at the end of each cycle we just make some minor changes to allow the players to recover - I think it benefits them both mentally and physically. Obviously as the season gets towards the end and we are hopefully looking at a finals campaign, we will be looking at making sure the players are peaking at the right time,"" Quinn said.

It would appear that Quinn's cyclical approach to the club's training has worked with soft tissue injuries down significantly in the past two seasons when compared to previous years. ""We would like to think that the training cycles have played a part in keeping soft tissue injuries down but there are a number of other things we do which also play a part,"" Quinn said. ""I think some credit should also go to the players - we give them a pretty strict approach to training and they follow it to the letter.""