Why? The Science of Athletics

HUMAN MECHANISM 79 In this connection, Dr. Adolphe Abrahams, Medical Adviser to the International Athletic Board of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and his brother Harold, himself .an Olympic champion, have in their book Training for Athletes, drawn attention to the popular , theory that complete renewal of the body occurs every seven years and that it is stated on reliable authority that the cells in the blood, which are perpetually under– going. destruction, are replaced at the rate of just under 2% per day. So that it must, on these figures, take approximately two months to renew entirely our red blood corpuscles. This is an interesting theory, because most coaches lay down two months as being the minimum period for the carrying out of an adequate scheme of athletic training. This minimum period for the training of the athlete was fixed long before science had made its present dis– coveries and provides yet another of those illuminating examples of the way in which men seem to hit naturally upon right methods, the correctness of which is often not confirmed by science until long after the men who first devised the natural methods are dead and buried. I have spoken already of the white corpuscles, which are many hundreds of times less numerous in our blood than are the red corpuscles. The functions of both kinds of corpuscles seem to be quite well defined. The red ~nes are oxygen-carriers; those that are white may be hkened to our defenders against the invasions of poisonous bacteria. When our tissues are damaged, injurious bacteria attack and begin to multiply with terrifying rapidity, but the blood stream brings white corpuscles from all parts of the body to defend the threatened tissues and the struggle that ensues creates the patient's "temperature". . From the foregoing remarks, and from what appeared In .the last chapter, the reader will appreciate that the :namtenance of the regularity of the blood-stream is all– Important. The heart must pump blood to the tissues