Tampa, FL – January 10, 2017 – Raymond James Stadium: The Clemson University Tigers during the 2017 CFP National Championship Game Presented by AT&T
(Photo by Phil Ellsworth / ESPN Images)
When defending national champion Clemson opened its new $55 million football complex in January, its greatest benefit to player performance — more so than the lounge with barber shop, arcade, bowling alley and laser tag — was the dedicated nap room, stocked with eight bunk beds, three massage chairs and bean bags. The Tigers have now doubled down on the importance of sleep and contracted Rise Science, a Chicago-based sleep coaching program, to ensure that players maximize their natural recovery.
“Sleep is the most potent performance-enhancing activity that we know of,” Rise CEO Jeff Kahn told SportTechie, noting that proper rest exceeds the boost given by any drug or routine.
Rise monitors players’ quantity and quality of sleep through an under-mattress ribbon of force sensors with enough sensitivity to detect every heart beat throughout the night; it’s part of a scientific discipline called ballistocardiography. By analyzing a player’s heart-rate variability, Rise can estimate recovery levels and even recommend extra sleep or a nap when needed. Each player can communicate with a sleep coach through an app, which helps cater individualized sleep programs.
Kahn and his friends, Jacob Kelter and Leon Sasson, co-founded Rise as undergraduate Northwestern engineering students. The head trainer of the Northwestern football program granted them permission to work with their players, and those early randomized, controlled trials led to an average per-night improvement of 54 minutes of sleep. Over a four-month schedule, a player might sleep 120 more hours of sleep per season.
“The key was this personal level of feedback that was leading to this behavior change over time,” he said.
The advantages are real: a series of studies show that getting enough sleep can lead to reductions in injury rate (by as much as 70 percent) and illness (one-third the chance of catching a cold) while sleep deprivation can diminish reaction time (by 18 percent) and metabolism (more than 30 percent). Effort, play execution and speed of learning were all improved, too. Among football-specific benefits were the potential to trim 40-yard dash times by a tenth of a second, improve field-goal accuracy by 20 percent and cut mental errors in half.
Sleep science is an emerging field in American sports. Trend stories in national publications pegged the number of NFL teams engaging in its use to be at least a dozen, with Whoop and Fatigue Science as some of Rise’s competitors. Clubs in Major League Baseball, with its 162-game, six-month schedule with heavy travel, have also explored the benefits. The World Series champion Chicago Cubs used Fatigue Science last year, and sleep experts Chris Winter, Cheri Mah and Scott Kutscher have all worked with several baseball organizations as well as teams in other sports.
Rise has worked with 10 Division I college and professional sports teams, including the Chicago Bulls, Jacksonville Jaguars, Miami Dolphins, West Virginia Mountaineers and Tennessee Volunteers. This season, they are adding a dozen new teams to the program from the NFL and NCAA Power 5 Conferences.
Kahn said the feedback he has received from trainers and strength coaches is that managing players’ recovery from workouts and games is their primary challenge each season. The vast majority of natural growth hormone — which regulates body composition and has tremendous restorative properties — is excreted during sleep.
Even last summer, before Clemson’s title run, one football official declared sleep to be the team’s “number one problem,” prompting the nap room and, now, the addition of Rise.
“We’ve already seen our student-athletes improve their sleep, and they feel the benefits,” Joey Batson, Clemson’s director of strength and conditioning, said in a statement. “We know how hard it is for student-athletes to prioritize sleep, but Rise provides individualized sleep plans and feedback and the program is really easy for our players and staff. Rise isn’t just showing our athletes how they are sleeping; the program helps them improve sleep discipline and increase overall sleep time, which we know will translate to better performance on and off the field.”
The program works, Kahn stressed, by empowering players to make their own decisions and that the players own their data. He said Clemson’s culture was a good fit because of the way the program emphasizes self-awareness and self-accountability from everyone on the roster. Coaches receive aggregated reports of Rise data, which can guide practice plans based on players’ readiness.
For now, these programs are crafted for elite athletes, but no less an authority than the CDC has labeled insufficient sleep “a public health problem.”
“This is not a problem just for athletes,” Kahn said. “We think it’s the biggest public health concern in the country right now.”
