The session was headed by AFLW Strength and Conditioning Coach Sean Connolly alongside AFLW players Jess Sedunary, Aisling McCarthy and Krstel Petrevski who provided the Police academy trainers with skills to enhance their training programs.
The visit was a collaboration between the West Coast Eagles and WA Police Physical Training Unit to better prepare new recruits for operational policing whilst reducing their rates of injury.
Connolly provided specific landing techniques to the attending trainers which they can add to their current training curriculum.
“We taught them the basics of landing so that they could then progress forward and make it more advanced within their training program,” he said.
“In my opinion, landing is way more important than jumping. If we can teach them how to land and how to absorb force, they’re going to have much more control in real-life situations.”
Connolly highlighted the obvious differences between the landing situations for the WA Police in comparison to AFL or AFLW players and aimed to provide the trainers with methods to create a sense of realism within their program.
“The main difference between how we’ve taught our players compared to the Police instructors is the vast range of terrain they could be landing on.”
“There’s so many more factors that go into how they need to land safely compared to a football player, so if I can give them some tools to land safer wherever they are, they can hopefully reduce the number of injuries.”
“Preparing them to learn to land with the boots, belt, full kit and everything else is a much more difficult task than what our male and female players have.”
Physical Trainer for the WA Police Physical Training Unit Duncan Brooks had nothing but positives to say regarding the session and hopes to implement the learned techniques into their program right away.
“It was really insightful learning jumping techniques, landing quietly, as well as being able to land with an external force, and those are some things we can apply those straight into our academy training,” he said.
“For our officers in training we take them through our obstacle course, so we will include some of this into that first session and also some prehab stuff moving forward from that as well.”
“It was great coming here and learning how we can better teach our new staff safer jumping and landing techniques, which will reduce some of our injuries when officers are climbing fences and in the field.”
Connolly praised the WA Police Physical Training Unit trainers for their enthusiasm and desire to improve upon their current program to benefit all new recruits.
“The personal instructors were wonderful and they genuinely cared about making a difference to the Police force and making their recruits safer during training.”
