Darren Burgess has created a radical running regimen that's turned the cellar-dwelling club into premiership contenders.

It’s just gone 11am and the thermometer clipped to the Alberton Oval fence shows a temperature nudging 35ºC.

A week earlier, scorching winds raked over Adelaide, pushing the mercury above 40ºC and sparking a string of wild bushfires in the hills north of the city. But today’s heat is different: it’s cloying, close, breathless. An afternoon thunderstorm is predicted and – judging by the rivulets of sweat running down the faces of the Port Adelaide players – it can’t come soon enough. They’ve been out in the middle of the oval for more than 90 minutes, playing mini games, sprinting through game-style set-ups and occasionally dropping into punitive sets of push-ups.

They’re blowing hard when coach Ken Hinkley calls the squad into a huddle and informs them they’re going to do some running. The players glance at one another. This is unexpected. Running now? Sensing their trepidation, Hinkley raises his voice: “This is a mental battle. We’re two-thirds of the way through this session – let’s finish it off.” Having said his piece, he hands the team over to his high-performance manager, Darren Burgess.

Hands on hips, a stopwatch slung around his neck, Burgess outlines the plan. The players will be doing 100-metre shuttles with a 45-second jog recovery. “You’ll be getting a decent break,” he says, “so I want the hundreds to be sharp.” He doesn’t tell them how many reps they’ll be doing; he doesn’t tell them how long the session will last. The players line up.

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The first few reps look easy, the midfielders scampering out in front, the ruckmen lumbering behind. By the sixth rep, however, some of the bigger men are starting to look ragged. By the seventh, you can hear the pneumatic hiss of their breaths. By the eighth, they’re cactus. Burgess blows his whistle. “Righto, get in the goal square and have a drink. We’re going again in two minutes.” From somewhere in the group comes a stifled moan.

The session is pure Burgess. Nothing complicated, no parameters, no heed to the thermometer. Just run. And run. And run. Until you’re told to stop.

Burgess’s motto is: “You can run more than you think you can”. It’s a philosophy he’s imposed on the Port Adelaide roster since he came to the club in 2013 – and it’s borne remarkable fruit. The under-performers who finished 14th on the ladder in 2012 are a team reinvented. Playing an up-tempo, run-and-gun game, the young Port line-up has stormed the past two seasons. Habitually gobbling up fourth-quarter deficits, they’ve out-run and out-lasted more fancied teams to finish within a whisker of the Grand Final in both years. And much of that success can be traced straight back to the big bloke with his hands on his hips and that stopwatch slung around his neck.

Burgess has taken Port to another level. In a league of hard-running teams, he’s built a unit that can run harder.

It’s a singular achievement. Every footballer in the AFL is supremely fit; every club has a battery of trainers and high-performance staff beavering away to find that extra one per cent. And yet, peddling his motto, Burgess has taken Port to another level. In a league of hard-running teams, he’s built a unit who can run harder; in a game populated by outstanding endurance athletes, he’s honed a group of footballers who can last longer. His methods have revolutionised notions of endurance in the AFL – a true Moneyball moment in the realm of fitness.

Port Adelaide chairman David Koch is effusive in his praise. “There’s a buzz around the club that wasn’t there three years ago,” he enthuses. “And Darren’s been an absolutely enormous part of that . . . Along with Ken Hinkley, he’s been one of the two key building blocks of our football program. In terms of fitness and mobility, he’s taken AFL to a whole new level.”

Little wonder Port management guards Burgess’s “intellectual property” with extreme jealousy. Fitness sessions are officially closed to the media. Numbers, data and specific sessions are kept under lock and key. But on this sweltering Adelaide morning, the curtain has been pulled back and Men’s Health has been ushered in to watch this fitness guru at work. And as we watch the Port players line-up for their second set of 100m reps, it’s clear Burgess’s methods don’t just apply to professional footballers. No matter what your game, no matter what your fitness level, you can run more than you think you can.

Above and Beyond
Two hours later, sitting in a glass-walled office overlooking the squat racks of the Port Adelaide gym, Burgess delves into the nuts and bolts of his motto. In a career that’s taken him from the Sydney Swans, to Port Adelaide, to the Socceroos, to EPL giants Liverpool, and now back to Port, he’s observed the finest athletes at close quarters. And his observations have convinced him that the human body can withstand far more punishment than we could ever imagine. “If you compare AFL football to other team sports around the world – like NBA basketball, European soccer, even MLB baseball – they play a lot more games than we do, and they train a lot harder than we do. So my general theory is that AFL players can run a lot further and a lot harder than has traditionally been thought.” He shrugs: “That’s what we’re living and dying by here.”

According to Burgess, it’s a notion that applies as readily to the weekend jogger as it does the professional footballer. “The body only adapts when you take it beyond its normal course of exercise,” he says, tapping the desk for emphasis. “In the gym, that means going to failure on every single set that you do. Where people go wrong in their day-to-day fitness is that they don’t have the ability to push themselves to failure every single set.”

No matter what your game, no matter what your fitness level, you can run more than you think you can

Burgess employs the analogy of moving furniture. If you help a mate empty his apartment, you’ll be aching the next day. But removalists? They’ll be fine, because their bodies have adapted to the stresses of hoisting beds and shifting couches. “You have to continually stress your body and take it to failure,” he says, “otherwise it won’t adapt.” Couched in these terms, the philosophy sounds elementary – a basic process of stimulation and adaptation. In fact, it drives to the heart of how the human body registers fatigue.

Traditionally, scientists assumed that fatigue originated in the muscles themselves, with lactic acid building to a point where the muscle simply ceased to function. It was a theory that set clear parameters on the limits of human endurance. When your muscles filled with lactic acid, you stopped moving.

This theory, however, foundered in 1999 when a group of physiologists from the University of Cape Town conducted a revelatory experiment. After pushing cyclists to the point of exhaustion on an exercise bike, the researchers measured the number of muscle fibres they were recruiting at peak effort. The figures stunned them: even at the point of blackout, the cyclists were using only around 30 per cent of their leg muscles. If fatigue’s muscular, surely the entire muscle should have been firing as the cyclists’ bodies began to shut down?

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These results forced an about-turn in our understanding of physical exhaustion. Fatigue, the physiologists concluded, is a product of the brain, not the muscles. It’s the work of a “central governor” that registers our energy stores and effort levels, creating painful sensations we interpret as an unendurable muscular exhaustion when they slip out of balance. That gut-wrenching certainty you’ll keel over and die if you run another step? It’s a trick of the mind.

Burgess, of course, is a fierce advocate of the central governor theory. “I’m absolutely convinced,” he says, “that the mental barrier is the biggest barrier to physical success. It’s a mental thing, not a physical thing.” In his philosophy, your mind will adapt to your workout. If you get tired running five kilometres, then you’ll keep getting tired at the 5km mark, because your brain’s anticipating it. Conversely, if you’re constantly changing and expanding your workouts, then your mind adapts to these new stimuli. “The more you can push yourself into that uncomfortable zone,” says Burgess, “the more used to operating in that zone you become, and the more used to pushing beyond that zone you become.”

Put simply, the more you push your body, the more you can push your mind. In this way, you can run more than you think you can .

Crank Up The Heat
All of which is easily applied to your garden-variety jogger. But how do you take professional footballers – men whose craft is founded on exceptional running ability – into that uncomfortable zone? How do you take men who already push their body to the limit and push them a little further? The answer was beating down on Burgess’s beaded brow – heat.

When coaches talk about adding an “environmental stimulus” to training, they’re typically referring to altitude training. Ever since the 1968 Olympics, which saw endurance athletes struggle at Mexico City’s lung-busting elevation of 2240m, training at oxygen-light altitudes has been the method du jour for using environment to boost performance. Over the past decade, AFL teams have leapt on the altitude bandwagon, with Collingwood, Brisbane, Carlton, Essendon, Gold Coast, North Melbourne, St Kilda and the Western Bulldogs all sending squads to high-altitude endurance-sport meccas like Boulder, Colorado.

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Using heat as an environmental stimulus, Burgess admits, has never been as “sexy” as altitude. “But physiologically, all you’re doing is applying a stimulus to make the exercise harder,” he says. “You’re forcing your body to adapt to a tougher environment.”

The mechanism is simple. When you stride out at 20ºC, your body sends blood to both your working muscles and your brain. When you run in 40ºC temperatures, suddenly your body has a decision to make. Your muscles need oxygen, so it sends blood to your legs. And your brain needs oxygen, so it sends blood to your head. But now it’s faced with a third challenge: you’re working harder to evaporate the heat that your working muscles are creating, so your body also has to shunt blood to the skin where it can be cooled. Suddenly your heart’s pumping blood to three places: the muscles, the brain and the skin.

“Basically, this means there’s less blood getting pumped to your muscles,” explains Burgess. “You’re creating a starved environment for your body to work in. That’s why heat is an extra stimulus. Train in the heat, then come back to a normal training environment and you’ll have all these adaptations – increased plasma volume, increased mitochondrial activity.” He grins: “They’re nice adaptations to have.”

Indeed, research suggests the physical adaptations of sweating it out in heat may even outstrip those of blowing hard at altitude. A recent study from Doha’s Aspire Academy of Sports Excellence sought to compare the impacts of altitude and heat on a professional football team completing a preseason camp in Qatar. At night, half of the squad slept in an oxygen-depleted hypoxic chamber, the other half slept in normal rooms. Once the sun rose, the entire squad trained in the searing desert heat. At the end of the 12-day camp, both groups showed almost identical gains in their high-intensity running performance. The researcher’s conclusion: the additional effects of altitude were minuscule compared with heat training alone, while the practicalities of training in heat easily outstripped altitude.

Herein lies the real beauty of heat training. It doesn’t demand a hypoxic chamber or a plane trip to Colorado. All it requires is a dollop of sunscreen and a willingness to sweat. These days, whenever Burgess goes for a run, he’ll wait till the hottest part of the day before lacing on his trainers. He shrugs: “I like to challenge myself in that way.” He contends that tapping into the performance-enhancing effects of heat is simply a matter of tweaking your routine. If you head to the air-conditioned comfort of the gym during the heat of summer – get outside instead. If you set the alarm for your weekend run to avoid the heat of the day – sleep in and set out at midday instead. “Gradually chip away at it,” he advises. “It’s going to challenge your cardiovascular system to improve your fitness at a quicker rate.”

Of course, “gradually chipping away at it” is not the modus operandi of professional footballers. For this reason, Burgess ramps things up for the Port boys. Over the past two years, the squad has opened their preseason with an eight-day blitz in the baking heat of Dubai’s Nad al Sheba Sports Club. The heft of these camps is legendary. They’re designed to push boundaries, stretch expectations, force adaptations. The running is constant, the intensity brutal, the heat horrific.
Ask Alipate Carlile about the most recent camp and the burly shut-down defender cracks a wry grin. “Getting off the plane on the first day straight into a stack of hundreds – that wasn’t pretty. From there it was pretty much all downhill.”

Burgess chuckles at Carlile’s dig. Yes, he admits the camp is high-risk. But it’s also high-reward. As evidence, he offers a story from the team’s first trip to Dubai in 2013. It was day nine, the last day of the camp. They were on a plane back to Australia that evening. As a finale, the players were paired off and instructed to run 1km reps. One by one, they stumbled in, collapsing over the line. For the final rep, two midfield whippets – Kane Cornes and Kane Mitchell – found themselves at the start line.

Burgess’s eyes widen as he tells the story. “The way these two guys attacked this last one-kay rep was absolutely incredible. It would have been really easy to say, ‘You know what, it’s been nine days straight, we’re on the plane tonight, there’s nothing riding on this, let’s back it off’. But their natural, competitive instincts took over. They were neck and neck the whole way. It was incredible. They ended up running that kilometre in just under three minutes – which is a phenomenal time. In the last three steps the old-timer Kane Cornes said, ‘You’re not going to beat me’. He got over the line and won.”

Yes, it’s a tiny snippet of action, a “speccy” in the course of a season. But it’s proof – if proof were needed – that Burgess is right: you can run more than you think you can.