Neale Daniher's troops might care to argue the point, but head fitness coach Bohdan Babijczuk believes they've never had it so good on the training track.

That's not to say the athletics guru is suggesting the modern Demons are a bunch of slackers. Far from it.

The veteran conditioner is merely making the point that science and the era of professionalism have combined to overhaul the forces that once made pre-season training a time of pain and misery for many players.

The days of the dictatorial coach conducting pre-season training on his own are long gone, said Babijczuk when asked to compare today's training regimens with those of the recent past.

“Coaches used to play mind games with the players, telling them, for example, ‘you don’t need water’. In those days it was a dictatorship. The coaches were military-style leaders. The fitness coach had to be a 'yes' man. If he didn’t do what the coach wanted, he’d get the sack.

“Now, there’s not just one person in charge of pre-season. You have fitness staff, medical people controlling things. There are lots of checks and balances.

“You accumulate more volumes of training but it's more spread out these days. You’re not looking for instant results.”

Much more science and expertise went into devising modern training programs, Babijczuk added. And whereas once players could have been bullied, cajoled or led blindly down a certain path, they are now more educated and take more interest in their conditioning programs. They demand reasons for doing things a certain way. They see how other clubs’ methods are getting results and ask ‘why aren’t we doing this or that?’

Brian Goorjian, the national men’s basketball team coach with whom Babijczuk has also worked, once told him: ‘You can’t bullshit blokes these days’. Babijczuk, a former elite athletics coach who has also worked with Collingwood and Hawthorn, is inclined to agree.

The increased tempo of the modern game with the emphasis it places on defensive running without the ball demands training drills that are more focused and designed to reproduce the speed and intensity of matches.

"The drills are more intense. The players might not be out there as long but they are working harder," Babijczuk said.

Despite the expansion of the clubs' backrooms and the spread of duties, the senior coach retains the biggest influence on the general focus of training, Babijczuk said, and fitness staff must devise players’ programs based on the style of game the coach wants.

This perhaps explains why fitness programs come in and out of fashion. When he was at Hawthorn in the late ’90s, Babijczuk said the trend was towards producing lean, middle-distance runners, also with good speed. When Brisbane began their reign of supremacy at the start of the millennium, he says the Lions sparked a trend by developing bigger bodies to suit their muscular game plan. Babijczuk believes the wheel has turned and leaner bodies with good strength, speed and endurance are back in vogue.

The approach to weight training has also changed dramatically, he said. Once it was just about creating bulk to absorb impact. Now weights programs are built into the running model. “The integration of weight training with running and skills training and everything else is crucial. It’s a much cleverer overall program you’re getting now.

“I think the players enjoy it more, but it used to be a shorter pre-season, so maybe that was the trade-off. They go on camps and have different specialists coming in for sessions to add variety.”

The management of players’ individual programs is also much better, Babijczuk said. “You have young guys being eased into their workloads, players in the middle phase of their careers building up to high volumes of training and more senior players in the last phase of their careers who might be on maintenance programs.”

Babijczuk and his two other full-time fitness staff are constantly monitoring the Melbourne players’ physical condition in order to tweak the club’s training schedule to optimum effect. “We might have to throw out a planned running session once we’ve got the feedback from the previous session. But we can make that up down the track because we've got [the players] in full time these days.”