HEAD coach of MVP Track and Field Club Stephen Francis has challenged the nation’s young coaches to become familiar with new trends and ideas.

Francis was delivering his keynote address at the Howard Aris Memorial Lecture organised by the Gibson McCook Relays Organising Committee at the University of Technology on Wednesday.

“The difference between some coaches and myself (is that) I have a tendency to push the knowledge barrier and very often there are things there that one can find out and I said to myself ‘let me find some areas where we can give new knowledge to people and give an option to look further or implement what is already at hand’,” he said.

Asked what was his impression of the audience’s reaction, Francis responded: “Well, my hope is that a few of the young coaches have grasped some of what I was trying to say and look especially at the opening proclamation I’ve made — that the secret of what they should strive to do is to ensure that they know why they do it.”

During his lengthy presentation, Francis chronicled no less than 12 areas in the athletic training spectrum and explained section-by-section how best results could be attained through careful and thoughtful methods of application that work for individual coaches.

While the lecture was on athletics, there was copious knowledge in it for other sporting disciplines to profit: from bowling to badminton.

In his discourse, Francis shed light on two of the most essential, yet most disputed and neglected areas in preparing for an event — stretching and warming up.

Warm-up and stretching was one of the 12 disciplines discussed and drew the most comments.

Talking on the subject of recovery for the athlete during competition Francis said: “What are the recovery mechanisms we can use? There are many… there are a lot of coaches who say that ice baths help their athletes to recover. Science is neutral in this respect.

“However, the only thing that is proven that has good effect on performance is to cool down properly, which means you spend 10 or so minutes jogging and then stretching. At that point you can now check for five seconds, 10 seconds and so on. But that is the most important factor along with massage that will help performance in the future.”

— Hurbun Williams