Coaching and Care of Athletes

CARE AND CONDITIONING meat, one or two soft-boiled eggs, one baked potato, toast or bread, and milk or mild tea. In designing the scheme for a training table the coach should never forget that the daily diet must consist of a good breakfast, a light lunch, and a more substantial evening meal. It is scientifi– cally true to say that the stomach is in a better receptive condition for food in the morning than at any other time during the day. Further, it should be remembered that the training period is usually in the afternoon, not long after lunch, which it is therefore inadvisable to make too substantial, for the reason I explained earlier about the blood's not being able to leave the digestive tract to supply the muscles soon after a heavy meal has been eaten. The same remark applies in a lesser degree to the evening meal, and the situation here may be summed up in the advice not to take a heavy meal either shortly before or shortly after heavy exercise. At the risk of repeating one of my previous points I would now remark that if a moderately light dinner or supper is taken in the evening it can be supplemented by a glass of Ovaltine and milk, with a rusk or some bread and ·butter, on getting into bed. This procedure seems to me to place less strain upon the process of digestion, while at the same time providing a sleep stimulus for the athlete iyt the sense of well-being he gets when he is in bed from the warm drink and the small amount of food which accom- panies it. ' • Many coaches, I expect, will quarrel with my advice to give the athlete some slight refreshment at mid-morning if there is to be a training session between breakfast and lunch-time. None the less I give this advice from a certain marked,experience with individual athletes, but more particularly in relation with the English Summer School, where in the course of the last four or five years we have found that it is advisable to give men who are working from 9 A.M. to I2.30 P.M. a half-hour's break at I I o'clock, when they go into the pavilion anti have a glass of milk, or a cup of tea, and a few biscuits. They seem to return to their work for the last hour from I 1.30 to I2.30 with a good deal of renewed vig0ur. Apart from this, the -half-hour's break in mid-morning allows the athletes to discuss among themselves the lessons they have been taught between 9 and I I A. M. Lunch, as scheduled by Michael Murphy for American athletes -and ideas on dietary in America do n_ot seem to have changed I-l5