09 June,2010 12:37 PM IST | | Agencies
The British soccer team has devised a new ploy to improve their athletic performance in the upcoming FIFA World Cup in South Africa - the footies will abstain from sex.u00a0u00a0
The English squad will only be allowed to see their wives and girlfriends once after each game, and even less if they are winning matches.
Brit players'' partners cannot stay overnight and sex is completely forbidden.
To see that the rule is not violated the coach will keep an eye on his players via TVs installed in their rooms.
However, there is no evidence that sex impairs athletic performance.
"Coaches over the past four, five or six decades have stated that their players should not engage in sex before athletic events because it will weaken their performance without any serious research to support that or any base of scientific theory to understand why that''s wrong," Discovery News quoted Tommy Boone, an exercise physiologist at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minn., as saying.
Boone, the author of "Sex Before Athletic Competition: Myth or Fact", added: "There simply isn''t anything in the medical literature to support abstinence."
"Sex is mild exercise and does not fatigue the body. Hormonal spikes are controversial. And even if they did occur, it wouldn''t matter because they have to affect performance through physical or psychological mechanisms. We know there are no physical effects," Ian Shrier, a sports medicine expert at McGill University in Montreal, said.
