Why? The Science of Athletics

HEALTH ASPECTS AND HEALTH TRAINING 39 something that involves one sudden violent effort con– tracting all the muscles puts up the blood-pressure to 2! times normal and the beginning of an accumulation of self-intoxicating poisons is induced. In the same way, if you set a boy to lift a weight and hold it up as long as he can, or tell him to hang on to a horizontal · bar until he cannot do so any longer, you will see the signs of strain and fatigue creep into his expression as he sets the facial muscles. As the strain increases he will partly close his eyes, to protect, by muscular contraction, the delicate blood vessels of the orbit and the eyeball. He will restrain his breathing at first, finally he will hold it altogether as his fatigue increases, because the violent and sustained effort being made by a small group of muscles is hindering the free flow of blood to the muscles, by reason of the pressure upon the arteries and veins being too great. Neither violent activity, the raising of the blood pressure, nor a reasonable degree of fatigue is harmful to the young athlete, but if you keep him at work too long and too continuously at one period, his efforts will become more and more feeble, simply because his system is :p.ot being given time for the oxygen in the blood stream to turn lactic acid, a waste product of exhaustion, back into glycogen, so that he may have enough fuel, in the form of blood-sugar, to serve the needs of his muscles. But if it is important that there should be definite rest periods in each complete coaching period, so one should regard each week as a rather longer coaching period. The Jews of old were very wise people and one might well paraphrase the Ten Commandments to produce an adequate index to a perfect coaching manual. They were so thorough in all matters of social conduct, so meticulous in the observances of the laws of life, and the Commandments themselves are simply packed with Sheer common sense.