Darwin's heat and stifling humidity have prompted the Western Bulldogs to ramp up their preparations for Saturday night's AFL clash with Port Adelaide.

In an attempt to minimise any drop-off in performance during the match, the second-placed Bulldogs have been visiting a heat chamber up to three times a week for the past month.

Last year, the team had used heat training just two weeks prior to their clash with Fremantle at TIO Stadium when they stormed home to win by 26 points.

Bulldogs forward Robert Murphy said undergoing heat training might give his team the edge over the Power despite the initial drawbacks.

"First of all, it's a bit of a shock but after a couple of weeks you get pretty used to it," Murphy said.

"We're pretty confident that it works. We think that a slight advantage, in a competition that's pretty close, you take all the advantages that you can get.

"Just doing any sort of exercise in similar sorts of temperatures, your body adapts to it."

Sports scientist Rob Aughey, who works with Victoria University and the AFL club, said data collected from a two-year AFL investigation indicated heat training was an advantage.

Aughey said players could lose up to six per cent of their body mass if they failed to rehydrate properly during matches played in extreme heat.

But the club's move to have a longer time in the heat chamber would be beneficial.

"There are positive adaptations you can get from training in hot and humid conditions," he said.

"We've been doing this for four weeks now because some of those adaptations occur very quickly.

"You get changes in how much you sweat and the types of fluid that you sweat out.

"But there's some other longer term adaptations that we've after that enhances our ability to perform at a high intensity and repeat those efforts and they take longer than just one or two weeks, hence being in there for a month in the lead-up to the game in Darwin."

To further help the team to acclimatise, the `Dogs will leave Melbourne early Thursday morning for the trip north.

Murphy believed his team had a home ground advantage in Darwin despite a 50-50 home and away win-loss record in the Top End but said they were also primed for an assault from a pumped-up Port team after the Power's four-point loss to Richmond.

"You'd expect them to come out pretty fired up," he said.

"They've obviously had a disappointing result on the weekend - they're a great football club, a pretty proud one as well, so I'd imagine they'll be full of venom.'

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