Your timetable is the eating plan whether you like it or not

Session times decide when athletes can eat, and coaches set them for everybody except the athletes.

Training starts at six because the pitch is free at six, or because the coaching staff finish work at half five, or because that is when it has always started. Nobody in that decision was thinking about food. Yet the clock you picked determines what every athlete in the room can eat that day, and it overrules any advice a nutritionist will ever give them.

Look at a common amateur pattern. Session ends at half eight. Athletes get home at half nine, cook or do not cook, eat at ten, go to bed on a full stomach or an empty one, and are up at six. There is no arrangement of good intentions that fixes that. The constraint is the timetable and the timetable belongs to the coach.

The professional version is different but not automatically better. A double session day with fifty minutes between the end of one and the start of the next produces a gap in which nothing substantial can be eaten, so athletes take on something liquid and go again. Repeat that three days a week and the weekly intake is being set by a scheduling decision made for pitch availability.

What I want is for session times to be argued about with food in the room. Not as the only factor, because facilities, weather, staff and school hours are all real. Just as one of the factors, named out loud, with somebody in the meeting whose job is to say that a six thirty start on a Tuesday makes a decent evening meal impossible for half the squad.

Where the time cannot move, the club should absorb the consequence rather than pushing it onto the athlete. Food in the building after late sessions is not a luxury at professional level and is cheaper than most people assume at amateur level. A crate of sandwiches solves more than another education session about the importance of eating.

There is also a coaching habit worth breaking. Sessions overrun. Constantly. A session that was meant to finish at eight and finishes at twenty past has quietly taken the athlete's evening meal and moved it, and the coach who did that will complain the following week that recovery is poor.

Fix the clock before you lecture about the plate. The clock is the plan.