Lights Out Football: How Sleep Science Is Transforming the NFL | The MMQB with Peter King.

More and more, sleep is the being recognized as the most obvious, accessible and natural performance-enhancer in the NFL—the kind of secret weapon that players have always dreamed about.

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Some gadgets, biohacking and more. With the stakes $$$ being so high with professional sports, there’s a lot of effort to figure out any advantages. It will be interesting to see if sleep (and light), something that is free, is more powerful than any latest supplement or drug in the end for athletes…

When linebacker Demario Davis arrives at Jets headquarters at 6 a.m. to study film, he does so in the glow of a team-issued Litebook, a space-age device that helps him become more alert by emitting a beam of white light that has the same intensity as full daylight.

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Waiting in each player’s London hotel room was a kit, purchased by the team for around $100, that contained orange-colored glasses for players to wear while using their phones or studying film on tablets late at night; they are designed to block the short-wavelength light emitted from electronic devices that can interfere with sleep by keeping the brain awake. There was also the Litebook, the iPhone-sized device that resets circadian rhythms by waking the body up according to the new time zone with a beam of 10,000-lux white light.

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