Sports

When the NHL’s Vancouver Canucks need to fix their team’s travel schedule, they first contact Fatigue Science to determine the impact of the flight schedule on their team’s performance effectiveness.

The success of professional athletes and their teams depend on a number of factors including talent, motivation, coaching, strength and conditioning programs and diet. However, one of the most important and yet overlooked factors that can affect the performance of athletes is sleep.

Reaction time is directly impacted by the duration, timing and quality of sleep. This has been shown in several published scientific studies. Athletes today travel across the globe and have to adjust to jet lag, sleep in unfamiliar surroundings and/or make lifestyle choices that deprive them of necessary sleep. As a result, many athletes enter games with reduced reaction times, a greater chance of injury and lower motivation to perform at their optimum.

Work conducted by Fatigue Science with professional athletes shows that some athletes had reaction times 2.5 times slower during games when they were fatigued due to factors impacting their sleep. Fatigue Science offers an unobtrusive way to measure athletes’ sleep, changes in reaction time and risk of injury.

Fatigue Science sleep experts use our Fatigue Avoidance Scheduling Tool (FAST®) to input flight times, game times, and the team’s actual historical sleep patterns. Based on the results, flights and travel plans are changed in order to improve the team’s performance effectiveness scores and positively impact their reaction times.