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Next Big Thing: Sleep Science Is Becoming the NFL’s Secret Weapon
- Updated: October 5, 2016
Imagine a conference championship game five or 10 years from now. The road team, having traveled to London and Las Vegas for its previous playoff games, arrives in Foxborough and engineers a shocking upset with the help of a surprising strategy: Even though the team’s quarterback is an All-Pro known for picking apart defenses, it employs a scaled-back, run-heavy game plan.
The head coach explains his daring tactical shift at the postgame press conference. “Well, Deshaun’s sleep hygiene has been terrible because of all our travel,” he says. “Our monitors recorded a 37 percent reduction in high-order decision-making because of poor sleep. Meanwhile, Ezekiel’s sleep hygiene has been great, speeding his recovery from that high ankle sprain. So we decided to pound the ball between the tackles.”
Coaching decisions based on sleep habits? Precision monitoring of players’ sleep and how it affects their health and performance? “Sleep hygiene?”
Does sleep even make that much of a difference, assuming a player got at least a little of it in the 48 hours before kickoff?
It turns out that sleep is the next frontier of NFL performance. Sports scientists around the world are studying it. Companies are designing new products to monitor it. Sleep is becoming the elite athlete’s secret weapon, and the NFL is just starting to discover how to harness its potential.
Learning the Language of Sleep
Gary McCoy, a sports science consultant for many NFL teams over the last few years, watched a pair of receivers sweat their way through a training camp session in 2015. One receiver was a celebrated veteran, the other a speedy young up-and-comer. Both wore high-tech sensors that monitored their heart rates, body temperatures and physical stresses during the intense practice. The sensors confirmed that the stress data for each receiver was roughly equal: Practice was just as hard for both of them.
But after practice, the veteran was ready for a full weight-room session. The younger player was gassed. If there was no difference in practice difficulty, shouldn’t it have been the other way around? McCoy realized that the sensors were missing an important aspect of athletic performance.
“We’re measuring stress,” he said. “But what’s more important is stress response.”
There is still a lot of mystery surrounding sleep. Sleep science is a new science. Until a few years ago, there were only two ways to monitor sleep: polysomnography, the expensive, cumbersome lab equipment that placed participants in uncomfortable and unfamiliar locations (thus immediately affecting their sleep patterns); or unreliable surveys of the I slept about eight hours last night, doc variety that had little chance of yielding precise results.
The rise of wearable wrist tech has revolutionized sleep study. Your everyday Fitbit provides a wealth of information, so much that your in-law can post their bad night’s sleep data on Facebook as a warning to everyone that she’s going to have a crabby day.
NFL teams are notoriously more secretive about their training programs and sports science initiatives. But they do exist.
WHOOP, the company for whom McCoy works, has developed wearable tech that includes a sophisticated sleep monitoring system that measures the length and quality of a night’s sleep and converts it into an easy-to-interpret quality score.
Another company selling sleep monitors to the NFL, Fatigue Science has developed the ReadiBand sleep tracker and SAFTE bio-mathematical fatigue model software in conjunction with the U.S. Army Research Lab and Johns Hopkins University. The system “translates all the complexity and nuance around a person’s sleep into a performance prediction,” according to sales director Jacob Fiedler.
The NFL and American team sports in general have been slow to join the sleep science revolution. Chip Kelly was well-known for his sleep science initiatives in Philadelphia, though he scrapped the monitoring program in favor of a voluntary reporting program last year. And while Fatigue Science officially consults with the Seattle Seahawks, most relationships between NFL teams and sleep-monitor vendors are off the record. B/R found, however, that at least a dozen teams have recently explored some kind of sleep monitoring program.
The quiet embrace of studying slumber is not new in sports, particularly on the international scene. Nick Littlehales was a mattress company executive consulting with Premier League superpower Manchester United several years ago to help players with chronic back pain (and, he hoped, secure a few endorsements). When he became a familiar face around team headquarters, the British soccer press (which can make the NFL media look like a litter of kittens) took notice.
“The paparazzi wrote: Those pampered Manchester United players have got a sleep coach who’s tucking them in and reading them bedtime stories,” Littlehales joked. “So I became the Sleep Coach by default.”
The laughs died down as other football clubs began investigating the link between sleep and performance. Sleep Coach Littlehales has performance monitors and bedding products for sale, but he also designs seminars for players, coaches and teams.
“Working with elite athletes, you have to define a language,” he said. “If you tell them you’re a sleep coach, they’ll run a mile. It’s not something they’re very interested in.”
One of the first terms athletes and teams learn in that new language is sleep hygiene, the habits that lead to healthy sleep, from limiting caffeine and alcohol intake to monitoring the temperature and humidity of the bedroom to scaling back on nighttime smartphone use. There is other not-too-familiar terminology to master, including circadian rhythms (the biological 24-hour cycles that dictate everything from brain wave activity to digestion) and polyphasic sleep (multiple naps instead of an eight-hour sleep session: important for soldiers, astronauts and athletes on crazy travel …
