Coaching and Care of Athletes

COACHING AND CARE OF ATHLETES The training of a team during the late season or competition period may call for slightly different schedules from those already advanced for the individual athlete, who is the coach's sole charge. It is in this period, incidentally, that the coach must keep a particularly careful eye upon the weight charts of his athletes. These will give him early indication of staleness, and will enable him, if he is paying proper attention to his job, to balance the work, rest, and dietary of his team almost to the point of perfection. Each day's work, no matter whether the training session is in the morning or in the afternoon, should allow for the hour after the meal to be devoted by the coach to talking with his athletes. The nature of his talk will change at this stage of the training. He should not need to be so concerned about technique, as each man's style, by this time, should have become practically automatic. He must, however, go into such matters with his athletes as the general principles of tactics and strategy, and must explore and analyse what form they have shown in this phase of their development in recent trials and competitions. He should employ photographs, diagrams, and, above all, cinematograph films, if he can get hold of them, to show his athletes how they are shaping. It is also important at this stage of the proceedings that the coach should build up the confidence of his athletes by relating to them actual facts concern- . ing the progress champions have made in the past, and particularly how some of them, in spite of one setback after another_, have by proper training come through to victory at the precise moment when the big effort was called for. A further point about this final period of training is in relation to the exercises. A certain amount of body-building, bending, and stretching exercises must still be done, but this phase of the train– ing can be cut down a little to allow for the introduction of what may be termed the formal-event exercises. For example, the runner should practise each day the exercise known as inverted running. To perform this exercise the athlete reclines on the ground, then rolls up on to his shoulders, supporting his weight on the forks made by his thumbs and first fingers, the palms of'his hands being pressed against his hips. In this inverted position he performs an upside-down bicycling or running exercise. When his athletes are practising this exercise the coach must watch particu– larly to see that they are getting good balance and rhythm, .and that their leg action is parallel. He should also see how the toes 202