MELBOURNE'S Christian Petracca had to be rescued in a pool training incident gone wrong on Tuesday.

Petracca had pushed himself to the brink of unconsciousness in an underwater exercise at Melbourne Sports and Aquatic Centre.

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The Demons forward and his teammates had been required to hold medicine balls under water in a professionally supervised hypoxic session.

The session's co-ordinator was forced to jump into the pool to rescue Petracca when he struggled to resurface.

Petracca was visibly distressed after the incident.

He trained with the Demons later in the week and played in the five-point win over Hawthorn at the MCG on Saturday.

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Melbourne coach Simon Goodwin addressed the incident in his media conference after the victory over the Hawks. 

"He bounced up and ran into the players' lounge, as if nothing happened, Christian," Goodwin said.

"He does a lot of hypoxic swimming – it's something a lot of athletes do. It's something that's really well supervised by our high-performance staff and clearly he passed out.

"We're glad to still have him … but he needs to learn to take a breath when he's doing his hypoxy, let's put it that way."

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