Fremantle coach Justin Longmuir has declared he is always looking for ways to keep his players on edge after providing a fascinating insight into why he angrily stopped training last week.

Longmuir had the Dockers fired up for Friday night’s game against Adelaide and his emotions were high when he sprayed the team for not following instructions at a mid-week training session.

Longmuir also got stuck into the team at half-time against Richmond during Gather Round. While he is known for having a composed personality, Longmuir said it was important to seize upon moments to spark the players into action.

“I don’t think it’s a change for me. I’ve used that before,” he said.

“There are certain coaching moments throughout the week and across the course of the year that you need to latch on to and make the most of.

“There was one moment last week that was made a bit of. I’m always trying to look for those moments. Sometimes after a loss, the players are down on themselves and need a cuddle and sometimes they need a kick up the backside.

“As a coach, you’re trying to read the room, read the playing group and understand what they need. I felt like last week as a team we needed a bit of that. We want to get to the stage where the players are enforcing those things and driving those behaviours instead of it coming from me.”

Fremantle will play against St Kilda on Friday night and Saints coach Ross Lyon gave his team a huge spray during their loss last weekend.

Longmuir said he relied on instinct when deciding how to react.

“It’s gut feel on a lot of things,” he said.

“The Richmond one, the scoreboard was looking alright but we’ve got to try to look at our game irrespective of the scoreboard and think more of the function and are we implementing our style of play. So it was more highlighting that aspect of it. There’s different things you look at but you’ve got to trust your gut as well sometimes.

“It’s simple to say cop a spray. Last week at training was seen as we weren’t executing a certain aspect of our game that I wanted to see. It was probably deeper than that to be honest.

“It was, ‘Let’s think our way through training, let’s not waste a minute and let’s make sure we are here to maximise everything we do’. We don’t float through a training drill just like we don’t float through a gym session and we don’t float through a meeting. We’ve got to be on. The way we prepare usually comes out on the weekend.”

Star ruckman Luke Jackson is set to return to face the Saints after recovering from injury. He is training well at Cockburn and kicked two goals during a 12-minute stint of match simulation.