One nutrition talk in preseason is not coaching

Habits are skills, and no skill has ever been installed by a slideshow in the first week of July.

In the first fortnight of preseason a specialist comes in, talks for forty minutes with slides, answers three questions, and leaves. That is the entire nutrition education a lot of squads receive in a year. Nobody would teach a defensive shape that way and expect it to hold in November.

Think about how you coach anything else. You demonstrate, you break it down, you give a small amount to practise, you watch, you correct, you repeat it next week and the week after, you test it under pressure, and eventually it goes in. Then you refresh it, because things decay. A single presentation contains only the first step of that sequence and then abandons the athlete at the hardest part, which is doing it on a wet Wednesday when nobody is watching.

The other failure is timing. Preseason is the point of maximum motivation and minimum realism. Everybody intends to eat well in July. The behaviour that decides a season happens in the middle of a fixture backlog, on a coach home from an away game, in an exam period, or in the third week of an injury when training has stopped and appetite has not.

I would take the same forty minutes and cut it into twelve pieces spread across the year, each one attached to a moment that has actually arrived. Three minutes about travel, on the day before a long trip. Three minutes about eating around a double session, in the week you scheduled one. Three minutes on what to do when the fixture is at eleven in the morning rather than three in the afternoon, delivered when that fixture is next.

Attach a rep to each one. Something small and observable that the athlete does once and reports back on. Behaviour that gets practised and reviewed is behaviour that has been coached. Information that gets delivered and never mentioned again has been announced, which is not the same thing.

There is a decent argument that the coach should not be the one delivering this at all, and that a specialist knows more. True. But the specialist is not there on the Wednesday, and the person the athlete listens to is the one who picks the team.

Content is the easy part. Nobody in this sport is short of information. What is missing is the repetition, and repetition is our job.