Running a squad through Ramadan

For an individual athlete this month is a nutrition question. For a coach with 20 athletes, some fasting and some not, in one hall with one kitchen, it is a logistics question first and it is decided weeks before the month starts.

Say the obvious thing first, because it is the part most often skipped. Whether any athlete fasts is his decision and his alone, taken with whoever advises him on his faith.

A coach's job is to plan around the answers he is given, not to influence them.

Ask early, and ask individually

A squad is never uniform. Some will fast throughout, some are travelling and may not, some have medical reasons, and some will not want to discuss it in front of the group.

Everything else a coaching staff decides across a season is set out on the coaches page.

So the conversation happens one at a time and it happens in January, not in the first week of the month. What you need is a list: who is fasting, who is not, and who is uncertain.

Everything below depends on that list existing.

One schedule or two

The instinct is to split the group. It is usually the wrong call, because it doubles coaching hours, halves the sparring pool and separates a team at the point in the year when cohesion matters.

What tends to work: move the main session for everybody to after iftar, keep a technical session in the late afternoon, and let the athletes who are not fasting eat around it normally. Those athletes lose very little from an evening main session.

The ones who have chosen to fast gain the whole month.

The kitchen is the whole job

This is where camps fail, and it is entirely solvable with a fortnight's notice.

• Two service times every day, one of them before first light. That is a staffing question and it needs agreeing with the facility, in writing, before arrival.
• Suhoor cannot be an afterthought tray of bread. It is doing the work of breakfast and lunch for a training athlete.
• Fluid available at both windows in quantity, with salt on the table.
• Protein at both windows rather than only at iftar, because the target across the day is around 1.6 to 2.0 grams per kilogram and it will not fit into one sitting.
• Somewhere to eat at four in the morning that is not a corridor.

If the facility cannot do a pre-dawn service, that is worth knowing in January, because it changes which facility you use.

Travel moves sunset

A squad that flies to a camp or a tournament changes the times of both windows, sometimes by hours, and time zones shift the whole day.

Build that into the travel plan rather than discovering it on arrival. Establish the local first light and sunset for the dates you will be there, check that the hotel can serve at those times, and if you are crossing several time zones, expect the first 2 or 3 days to be worse than the rest.

The general travel case is in travel and away camps.

Testing continues

Athletes in a registered testing pool remain subject to whereabouts obligations and to no-notice testing throughout, and the month changes nothing about that.

What it does change is the practical experience. A doping control officer arriving in daylight will need a urine sample from an athlete who cannot drink until sunset, which can mean a long wait under observation. Several national anti-doping organisations publish guidance covering it: officers are trained to expect the delay and, where possible, to stay until sunset so the athlete can break the fast first.

Nobody is asked to break a fast in order to be tested.

Brief the squad on two things. A delay of that kind is normal and is not an accusation. And cooperation is not optional: waiting is fine, leaving or refusing is a violation, and a fast is not a defence.

The process itself is in called for a test, and the whereabouts rules are in whereabouts and ADAMS.

What to measure, weekly

Problems in this month do not announce themselves. An athlete does not report that he is underfuelled, he simply gets slightly worse for 3 weeks.

• Body mass, same day, same time, same conditions.
• Resting heart rate on waking.
• Hours of sleep, actually asked rather than assumed.
• A 1-to-10 rating of the last session, from the athlete rather than the coach.

Four numbers, 5 minutes a week per athlete. Any of them moving in the wrong direction for two consecutive weeks is a reason to reduce load or look at intake, and the underlying measure is energy availability, which anybody can run on the calculator.

What a federation should decide in advance

Three decisions, all of them cheap in January and expensive in March.

Which competitions fall inside the month and whether the squad enters them. What the training day looks like for the whole group.

And who is responsible for the kitchen arrangement, by name, because in most camps the honest answer is nobody.

Get those three settled and the month becomes an ordinary training block with an unusual timetable. Leave them and it becomes 30 days that quietly cost a season.

A squad with athletes observing more than one tradition has more than one arrangement to plan for, and they do not overlap. The comparison is in fasting and combat sport.