Fly Like an Athlete: Travel Tips From Sport To Help You Arrive Fresher And Stronger

Travel can really take it out of you. In fact, one bad flight can affect our mood, decision-making, energy and even strength, sometimes taking days to recover. If one industry knows how to navigate the effects of travel on performance, it’s pro sport, which depends on ensuring its athletes arrive ready to train, race or drive a car at 200mph.

We asked performance coach Pete McKnight, with over two decades of experience working with elite athletes, from Olympians to Formula 1 drivers, to share his strategies for arriving in the best shape possible.

There are two distinct ways travel impacts sleep and performance – jet lag and travel fatigue. Jet lag specifically refers to crossing multiple time zones, which requires your circadian rhythm to reset. Travel fatigue results from the experience of prolonged travel and stems from factors like sitting too long, waiting, low level stress, dehydration and poor nutrition. Both types can impair performance, and understanding the impact of each is the first step before making a plan.

There are multiple ways travel-induced fatigue and sleep deprivation can dramatically affect performance. For the F1 teams McKnight has worked with, three stood out.

Firstly, your Reaction time can be reduced by nearly a third – a huge drop in a sport like motor racing.

Decision-making is another area affected, due to increased emotional reactivity and reduced logical reasoning caused by changes in brain activity.

Your physical performance is also reduced by sleep issues. Muscle glycogen drops so your time to exhaustion can be lowered, whilst your perceived exertion also rises so physical work feels harder.

For athletes, the key is finding ways to minimise these effects. Knowing your chronotype allows you to strategise a scientific plan for how you travel. Broadly speaking, night owls adapt better when flying west and morning larks cope better flying east. Knowing your natural rhythm helps tailor your adaptation strategy, particularly around light exposure, meal times and when to sleep.

Light is a major regulator of your body clock, so athletes often begin adjusting their schedule days in advance, mimicking the new timezone’s sleep/wake cycle even before stepping on a plane, to get as close to the timezone as possible – eating meals at the new times, using sunglasses to limit light exposure at the wrong times, seeking light strategically when you need it.

Athletes are required to travel from a young age, so flights and internal travel are a part of your routine. Learning how to travel well becomes a critical part of their responsibility. Similarly for us, just saying ‘I’m not a good traveller’ can be a self-fulfilling prophecy and there are things we can do to change that narrative: prepare meals so you stay in control of what and when you eat, take advantage of noise-cancelling headphones and eye masks, avoid overstimulation and anything likely to raise stress and anxiety, move your body on the plane, wear comfortable clothes.

On arrival athletes will normalise things as quickly as possible to allow their mind and body to adapt quickly. So make sure you go for a jog to get that flight out of your system, stretch and mobilise your body, eat food you are used to and your body is comfortable with. Doing the same things on arrival allows your system to feel as comfortable as possible.

Performance is so often about getting the details right. Whether it’s a long holiday or a short business trip, taking some simple travel cues from sport could make all the difference to how you fly, and more importantly, how you feel when you hit the arrivals hall.

The ainslie + ainslie Performance People podcast applies insights from elite sport to everyday performance. New episodes every Tuesday.