Chapter 12: The Science of Football (Part 2)
Of course, if the digestive function is not good (like Messi), you can only choose fish meat that is easier to digest and absorb, especially sea fish with high protein content. Fortunately, Gao Jun's digestion and absorption abilities are quite good now, so beef is naturally the first choice. In any case, pork with lower nutritional value and extremely high fat content should be eaten as little as possible, or even not at all...
In addition to protein and minerals, dietary fiber and vitamins are also essential, so Gao Jun needs to eat almost more than 50% of the vegetables and fruits consumed by ordinary people every day, while also frequently eating animal liver to supplement various fat-soluble vitamins. Adequate and scientific diet has played a great role in enhancing Gao Jun's physique.
Nutrition is important, but physical exercise is even more indispensable. If the two can complement each other, the effect will be better. For Gao Jun, designing a suitable exercise program for himself is not a difficult task. Moreover, according to the requirements of modern football, the body is not only required to be strong, but also requires a reasonable proportion of strength training, endurance training, speed training and other training items. Gao Jun can even develop specialized nutrition and training plans for different muscle groups in his body to maximize adaptation to specific positional requirements on the field.
In fact, for the vast majority of young players and even some adult players, this may not necessarily be a good thing, because their positions on the field are likely to change greatly. However, with Gao Lin's many years of experience playing as a center forward, second forward, and attacking midfielder, he will naturally not play in other positions for the rest of his life, so he can settle down early and further enhance his competitiveness in these three positions, especially in his strongest positions as a second forward and shadow striker.
It's also worth mentioning that Gao Jun has always advocated for the idea of "rather than making up for weaknesses, it's better to strengthen one's strengths." Therefore, after discovering that his new body had a fast step frequency, he decisively put speed training as his top priority, and also made adjustments to his nutrition accordingly, which yielded good results. Moreover, in general, when training speed, explosive power and jumping ability will also be enhanced at the same time, which is equivalent to training three abilities at once.
As for strength training, young players are not suitable for high-intensity training too early. It's better to start strengthening after the growth of height stops. After all, it's different from reaching the limit at 18-20 years old. Strength will only reach its peak at 25 or even older (that's why power forwards often mature later). If young players do a lot of overload strength training during their youth, although they can temporarily improve their competitive advantage in games, it is very detrimental to their long-term development, especially for attacking players...
Xu Genbao is a qualified guardian. Although he rarely gives him pocket money to help Gao Jun develop good habits of thriftiness, he is very willing to spend money on food as long as it's not junk food that's bad for athletes' bodies. As a result, Gao Jun was able to apply the concept of scientific football to himself shortly after entering the base, and the effect became quite apparent in just over a year.
It's worth mentioning that when Gao Jun first arrived at the base, his malnourished and frail body showed a remarkable "catch-up growth effect" after receiving adequate nutrition. As a result, his development speed was incredibly fast in the first two years after joining the base. By July 2002, when Gao Jun had been with the base for a year and a half, his height had astonishingly reached over 1.5 meters. Although his weight also increased by nearly 30 pounds, he didn't look much stronger than when he first joined the base. However, his speed improved the most, running close to 12 seconds in the 100-meter dash at the age of 14, which was already impressive enough to surprise Xu Genbao and the base's coaches...
Gao Jun had originally hoped to promote his concept of rational nutrition and scientific training throughout the Chongming base, but first, he was too young at the time and no one would have believed him, even his own diet had to be disguised as something he liked to eat. Second, the base really didn't have any money.
The Chongming Football Base spends at least 200,000 yuan per child per year, with over a hundred young players currently training there. This one item alone costs over 30 million yuan annually. According to Gao Jun's understanding, the financial resources available when Xu Genbao founded the base (including personal investment and loans and sponsorships) were vastly different from those in the past, not even half of what is needed now, resulting in enormous economic pressure.
And if you want to follow his method to improve nutrition, beef is very expensive in China, and oyster sauce, cheese and other similar products are not cheap either. The athletes' food intake is generally very large, and after the young players enter puberty, they even eat more than adults, so the base has to spend at least over 3 million yuan more each year for this purpose. It's impossible for a youth training base to get that much sponsorship, Xu Genbao will go bankrupt in two years, and the base will be closed.
So Gao Jun could only find ways to influence Yu Hai and Zhang Chenglin, letting them eat more beef and seafood when they went home, making up for the nutritional deficiencies of the base's food. Although the effect was not as good as the diet plan Gao Jun had set for himself, it was at least better than before...
In this year and a half, Gao Jun not only developed physically but also easily graduated from junior high school ahead of schedule. His ball skills were quickly restored to 80-90% of their peak level through hard training. It must be admitted that recovering ball skills is much easier than starting from scratch, and young players have an obvious advantage in improving their skills compared to adults.
Although Gao Jun's physical condition is still far from his previous self due to his young age, he has the advantage of speed and explosive power, so his actual combat effectiveness is close to that of his past self. In rapid counterattacks, today's Gao Jun is even stronger than before.
Xu Genbao also saw Gao Lin's current strength, and he even said that classic sentence "He is China's Maradona" in advance. Due to Xu Genbao's big mouth, Gao Lin wanted to keep a low profile but couldn't, fortunately, he wasn't one of those kids, after 40 years of football career, his will had become extremely strong, no matter what the media said about him, whether it was praise or criticism, he could always maintain a stable mentality. This attitude of being unaffected by fame or defamation made Xu Genbao look at him with new eyes.
Although Gao Jun's current strength is enough to enter the national team, he is indeed too young. His thin and weak body may not be able to withstand the malicious fouls of adult players. To avoid "pulling seedlings to make them grow", Xu Genbao temporarily only recommended Gao Jun to the U19 national youth team.
Who would have thought that the head coach of the national youth team, Wang Baoshan, was blind to talent and thought that Gao Jun's short and weak physique could not be brought into play in the intense competition of the youth league matches. No matter how good his skills were in training videos, it didn't matter. As for awareness, with his low coaching level, he couldn't tell what was good or bad...
