Impact of travel and circadian disruption on athletic performance | Hacker News Reader

Impact of travel and circadian disruption on athletic performance

nature.com

57 pointsohmyblock21 comments

It would be interesting to see a similar study on motorsport drivers. You would be able to measure athletic performance more accurately because you're measured against a stopwatch. There are also fewer external factors than basketball as drivers simply go around the track as fast as they can without external obstacles (in qualifying rather than racing stages). Unlike basketball, their athletic performance is less influenced by reacting to what the other team is doing.

There are a range of time zones changes and non-changes. From three consecutive races in UTC+2 (Belgium, Netherlands, Italy in F1 this year) to large changes (Australia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia). The sample size can go beyond the 20 F1 drivers by including junior leagues (F2/F3) as well as MotoGP and other tournaments.

Some F1 teams, like McLaren, are already doing some interesting work outside of car performance which could have benefits outside of motorsport.[1] See MindMaze for work in neuroscience.

Separately, it would also be interesting to test non-drivers like pit stop crew and race strategists. Like drivers, their performance (albeit less/not athletic) can be measured against a stopwatch.

[1] https://www.mclaren.com/racing/partners/mindmaze/

I feel like it isn't necessary to study athletes while competing.

Just study athletes under controlled circumstances. I'm sure teams of all sports would be interested in seeing the results, and by extension, willing to fund the studies (esp. universities with strong athletic programs).

Sure, it's not necessary, but it is convenient. Athletes train in the off-season, so teams and sportspeople alike would not want their training disrupted knowing that it would probably negatively impact their performace next season when it really matters. May as well measure while sportspeople are travelling between time zones, rather than having a scary coach shouting "give me thirty, kid" at 3am.

I spoke to someone from McLaren not too long ago and if I remember correctly they plan their whole logistics such that the driver at the time of the race is in an optimal point in their circadian rhythm.

McLaren (and others) realised some years ago that considerable gains could also be had from improving human performance.

Do you know if they do this for their non-drivers? Imagine if they did this with strategists, pit-stop crew etc.? I bet it's not just athletic performance which is impacted, but cognitive performance too.

If you or your friend at McLaren have any insight about F1, please do email me (address is in my profile), I'm considering a career in it! My email is: hnblackvanilla@gmail.com

In Singapore, where the race is held at local nighttime but at a normal time for Europe, everybody (other than, IIRC, some of the media/marketing folks) stays on UK time. I've heard some strange stories about trying to find dinner at 4AM.

I don't know if they do but they are definitely aware of it. With performance I meant both athletic and cognitive performance. I would even say the link between circadian rhythm and cognitive performance is much more obvious than with physical performance. E.g. car accidents peak at the circadian low, alertness moves in parallel with the circadian rhythm etc.

I don't know anyone in particular from the racing team I'm afraid. Being the fantastic engineers that they are, they did a lot of work around optimising human performance (they were very secretive with specifics, this was one of the few concrete examples). At the time they had a team that tried to package some of this know-how into products/services and bring to market. I was working in employee health which was one of their target areas.

At the very least F1 is a very quantified sport since the cars have a ton of more or less high sample rate data channels that you can use to describe the environment of the driver. For the driver they will at least have heart rate, respiration and body temperature throughout the race.

In addition they have vast treasure troves of historical data to compare against.

Check out Peter Attia's podcast interviewing Luke Bennett, a performance doctor in F1. He goes into sleep and performance.

https://peterattiamd.com/lukebennett/

A partially related and interesting story is how Tinder has also affected performance of NBA players (pre-pandemia) [1]

[1] https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/page/presents18969358/tinde...

There's been a lot of attention to the impact of fatigue on performance in competitive cycling, it's interesting to see this research in other sports as well.

In 2015 Team Sky (the dominant pro team at the time) experimented with using a motorhome for their race leader instead of the provided hotels during a stage race, to help him sleep better at night. The UCI almost immediately banned the practice as an unfair advantage [1].

[1] https://cyclingtips.com/2015/06/team-sky-motorhome-blocked-b...

ESPN had an excellent piece in 2019 on how grueling the NBA travel schedule is for players, mainly in how it disrupts their sleep: "NBA exec: 'It's the dirty little secret that everybody knows about'", https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/27767289/dirty-little-se...

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21251094

I was watching Amazon's "All or Nothing" series, specifically the one about the New Zealand Rugby team aka the "All Blacks"

Since the international rugby league is spread across a wide variety of countries and time zones (e.g. Australia/NZ, South Africa and Argentina), it was fascinating to see that the NZ team will send players out ahead of time to acclimate to the time zone. They will also do this even if it means they will play short handed.

For example, if they are playing a series with Argentina, they will have players stay in Argentina through most of the series and not physically play in New Zealand till the end of the series. I always wondered how they quantified the benefit or if it was just a "makes sense to do that" style decision.

Fun and well thought out approach to a question we’ve all had for sports.

I don’t understand why the authors attributed the impact on performance to circadian rhythms, seems like they just threw it in there as a possible explanation for the results they recorded.

It could be any number of factors related to travel as far as the method is concerned.

Circadian rhythm and athletic performance have been studied quite a bit, see e.g. [1] at which time of day elite athletes swim fastest.

Apart from obvious confounding effects, which factors related to travel are you thinking of that aren't already mitigated at the elite level?

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72573-8

The opposing crowd and lack of familiarity with the stadium come to mind.

It’s pretty common to hear athletes comment on these aspects of away games.

That’s not to say circadian rhythms don’t have an affect, I’m sure they do.

The study’s methods however are related only to travel vs non-travel. The authors’ attribution/specific call-out to circadian rhythms is a bit odd to me, since it doesn’t seem like they tested/measured those specifically.

Edit: case in point: “ We also did not have data at the individual level regarding each player’s internal circadian timing, and therefore individual differences in circadian disruption could have differed between players and affected team outcomes.”

I don’t think circadian rhythms should have been mentioned in the title of the article at all. It should be about travel which is more broad and accurate to what they were measuring.

> I don’t think circadian rhythms should have been mentioned in the title of the article at all. It should be about travel which is more broad and accurate to what they were measuring.

Take this study as one study in a large body of research (and apart from scientific interest there is great financial interest as well). From that you can derive some priors on what will be likely mechanisms of effect and effect sizes.

What do you think is the primary effect behind travel? Sure there is discomfort, noise, stress, unfamiliarity of surroundings etc., but the primary effect is the disruption of circadian rhythm. And again there are a number of mitigation strategies such as taking melatonin, controlling stimulants (light in particular), sleep coaching etc, but even if you do all of this well (I know from others sports that this is done routinely at the elite level), your body is still at a different point in the circadian rhythm.

> The opposing crowd and lack of familiarity with the stadium come to mind.

You are absolutely correct. I don't think the paper excludes that other factors can confound results. I'm sure other studies will have tried to quantify these factors and there will be priors for that.

I bet Major League Baseball could have some good supporting statistics for this as well.

With so many games, often traveling the night before another series, I wonder if batting performance in particular is impacted.

I bet West -> East travel would be worse with the loss in time.

It looks like Five Thirty Eight did one piece on overseas MLB travel years ago but I'm a little surprised they don't seem to have looked at this more.

I always found it odd that boxing and MMA main events are often held at midnight or so.

Las Vegas, man...

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