Playing water polo, but 

thinking hockey. 

Image courtesy of WAIS

Australia's Olympic women’s water polo team is preparing for the Beijing Olympics by thinking outside of the pool – and looking to the hockey pitch for ways to improve their game.

It’s all part of an R&D program to develop new and better ways of playing water polo following rule changes introduced after the 2004 Athens Olympics.

“There wasn’t a lot of knowledge about water polo anyway, and when the new rules came in 2005 those demands changed enough so that the way you prepare an athlete is different,” says sports physiologist Ted Polglaze.

Mr Polglaze is based at the WA Institute of Sport and is working with the Olympic women’s water polo squad.

He says information and techniques revealed from studying elite hockey teams over the years have been used to help the water polo players adapt to their new game.

Both games are similar according to Mr Polglaze, inasmuch as they are team sports involving intermittent activity with short rapid bursts of explosive energy.

“Team sports are a combination of power and stamina, and understanding the mixture is the challenge,” he says. “Basically the aim is to wear down the opposition.”

The new rules for water polo include extra playing time, and shorter ‘shot clocks’ to ensure players have a shot quickly rather than waste time.

“So what that means is that there’s a lot more counter-attacking in water polo,” he says.

“So when the defenders get a shot they would instantly change to attack and sprint down to try to get a fast break. It’s now a higher tempo game.

“That is probably the biggest outcome in the changes to the rules.”

He says because water polo is a water sport, usually played indoors and involving physical contact underwater, methods such as GPS have been difficult to use to keep track of players.

“As a result we’ve had to come up with other ways such as video analysis and we’ve designed computer programs that allow us to break down each of the player’s movements at different times,” says Mr Polglaze.

“And then we can work out what the overall demands are, and work out how long the work-to-recovery ratio is and things like that.

“This is research that was done previously with hockey players, and we learned a lot about how to understand team sports and what the demands are.”