Dr Claire-Marie Roberts was working at Coventry City when she received a call from someone asking whether she knew how much oxygen was in the atmosphere. As the performance director, responsible for optimising players’ potential, she was accustomed to being pitched the latest gimmick promising miraculous gains. At times, she could receive up to 50 LinkedIn messages a week offering a device, supplement or technology that claimed to produce magical results.
That’s GCSE chemistry, she thought. Then came the sales pitch: “So what we’ve done is put oxygen in a can and we think you might want to use it.” “Right … oxygen in a can,” Roberts says, laughing at the memory. Suffice to say, she did not take the caller up on his offer to buy oxygen in a can for Coventry’s players.
Roberts has spent decades working in elite athlete performance and professional football, including nine years at the Premier League and two at Coventry, where she played a key role in their promotion as Championship champions before joining the Formula One team McLaren as director of human performance in the summer. She is shocked by how professional football is being duped by pseudoscience: from coaches and performance staff misled by snake-oil sellers, to players desperate for a shortcut and with money to burn. There’s so much sparkly marketing behind all these things.
It’s bordering on exploitation. How can I shortcut my preparation and recovery?’ Which I don’t think is a great starting point.” Roberts says some of the practices commonplace in elite football have little evidence behind them. She includes cryotherapy chambers – a common feature at elite training grounds.
If unavailable, ice baths are a fallback. Players enjoy them so much that Harry Kane was photographed standing in a wheelie bin full of ice after a Bayern Munich match at last year’s Club World Cup. When are you using it and why are you using it?
If you’re using it for recovery, sleep and nutrition are your best recovery modalities. No amount of putting anybody in a whole-body cryotherapy chamber is going to help them recover more if those two things aren’t taken care of.” But players are constantly attempting to shortcut nutrition, too. Supplements are a multibillion-pound industry that has its claws in the game.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
