Darren Burgess has a chuckle when Port Adelaide players are dubbed the AFL’s fittest – he reckons it’s a furphy.

Port’s fitness guru also has a quiet laugh when asked for his secrets – he hasn’t got any.

“It’s a pretty simple philosophy of hard work will get you the results that you’re after,” he tells AAP.

So it’s a myth? Port aren’t the fittest mob in the league?

“No, not at all,” Burgess says.

“We have got a very good natural running group. And we certainly think we train hard.

“But I think it’s really, really hard to judge who the fittest team is, simply because fourth quarters, there’s so much that goes into fourth quarters in terms of what has happened in the previous three and who has got the ball and who hasn’t.”

The Power’s reputation as fitness benchmarks is built on stunning finishes: they have won more last quarters than any other side this season.

But Burgess says it’s not all his doing and it’s mostly mind over matter.

“We’re a hard-working team and the guys have a really outstanding never give up attitude that the coaching group has instilled,” he says.

“I’m not trying to toe the party line or anything like that.

“That is what we genuinely believe: that it’s a natural running group with a great attitude and that means they are never out of the game.

“You have to have a belief in your fitness and you absolutely have to know you have done the hard work in pre-season and throughout the year – and our guys have certainly done that.

“And once you know that you can do it and you prove you can come back a few times, then absolutely mentally you have that comfort.

“The players have got that at the moment. Their belief in their running ability is excellent, so it does become that mental assurance that you can do it.”

Burgess is in his second season, and second coming, at Port Adelaide.

The world-renowned fitness expert returned to Port late in 2012 in a move which shocked many – he went from resource-rich Liverpool in the English Premier League to the cash-strapped Power in the AFL.

Burgess felt he owed Port: he broke a contract with the AFL entity in 2008 to take up a role with the Socceroos as Football Federation Australia’s head of sports science.

From the Socceroos, Burgess went to Liverpool.

Now he’s back at Port Adelaide with an unrivalled reputation as a master; a sage pushing the boundaries of footy fitness; a man as important as any in Port’s revival – descriptions which don’t impact on Burgess.

“I honestly have the theory that when people pat you on the back, you don’t get too excited about it. You don’t get too high with the highs and then too low with the lows,” he says.

For all his expertise, Burgess still has doubts – such as when he took Port players to Dubai last December for a 10-day camp.

After a 14-four flight from Adelaide, players arrived at 6.30am. Two hours later, they were on the running track and thinking Burgess was a madman.

“They weren’t stoked,” he says.

“I honestly don’t think, if I had laid out the plans for the camp for them, they would have been able to complete it because they would have said ‘no, there’s no way’.

“We tried to debunk a few myths that you have to recover from flights.

“We tried to say that if you believe in it, and you’re prepared to do the work, you will get the rewards and some of the old ways are necessarily correct.”

Burgess says in 17 years of training athletes, he never pushed a group so hard as he pushed Port in Dubai.

Towards the end of the camp, he considered giving the players an unscheduled day off, fearing he was over cooking them – but Port coach Ken Hinkley ordered them to keep going.

“It was a high-risk strategy but we thought the rewards were worth the risk and we didn’t have any injuries so we got away with it,” he says.

“What Dubai gave us was a really good fitness base, so after that Ken was able to do a whole lot more footy training.”

And Burgess isn’t finished in pushing the limits.

“Both pre-season and in-season, there’s probably one more level to go to,” he says.

“Ken and myself always thought it was a three-year plan for the guys and obviously this is year two.

“We think we can go to one more level. Whether that is right or wrong, I will let you know this time next year.”