Anyone who was watching training last week would have noticed a few strange drills.

Henry Playfair came up with the best. It’s a bit of an old-fashioned footy thing, where all the players get in pairs, grab each other’s hands, then shake them really hard and count to 10 very loudly. It’s really noisy, and it’s pretty funny.

I think it’s meant to be a warm-up drill, but the reason we did it was to literally shake things up.

As a club we go by the belief that the way you train is the way you play. For the previous couple of weeks, the leadership group was concerned that we weren’t training as well as we should, and we were seeing that in the way we were playing.

You know when training isn’t going well. There are signs, for example we might not be getting the game plan stuff right, or the skills aren’t up to the standard, or we are a bit flat and tired and the voices aren’t as loud as normal.

Until the Brisbane game last Saturday, the way we were playing was fluctuating and we were having a good half here or there, but not putting all four quarters together.

So we changed training a bit, shifting it to the morning a couple of times and tried different things. Sometimes we have a bit of a soccer game, or a bit of touch footy or one of the guys will say a few funny things to get us switched on.

Shawy is quite loud, he talks quite a bit at training and during games. You really know he is there and that’s why he gets a lot of the footy because he is always screaming for the ball! But it’s a good thing and we say to all the young guys, if you use your voice you’ll get the footy. And doing it at training is as important as doing it during games.

It does correlate to games. If you are not working hard enough at training, it flows into games. It is about getting into good habits - you push through the cones or you try to hit all your targets, your voice is up and that can get your confidence up before a game.

Last Saturday night was a great win with two players down injured and then three players down. The midfielders, including me, played a lot more minutes than normal. I played about 115 minutes of the 125 minutes, so I was nearly out there the whole time, and that was different.

I was definitely sorer this week so there was more of a focus on recovery. We will need every ounce of energy to take on the Cats this Sunday. I’ve never played in a winning team there at Skilled Stadium, so let’s hope we come home happy this week.