Latest technology will allow players to put their biological clock at the optimum setting
IAIN MacIntyre
Sun
The Sleep Performance Sleep Bracelet, a sleep-monitoring device that the Vancouver Canucks are wearing.
DETROIT — The Vancouver Canucks have never owned Stanley Cup rings. But they’re wearing biorhythm bracelets, which the National Hockey League team hopes might help get players the jewelry they really want.
Canuck players have been issued black bracelets to monitor their circadian rhythms, which are hard to dance to but set everyone’s biological clock.
Circadian rhythms are regular mental and physical changes, driven by light and darkness and other factors, that occur over a 24-hour period. Canuck players are wearing the rhythm monitors — “sleep bands” — during their six-game, 11-night road trip, removing them only for games and practices. Or, for Daniel and Henrik Sedin on Tuesday, to go swimming.
The information will be downloaded next week when the trip ends, and each players’ rest and energy patterns evaluated.
The innovative program, being overseen by the Vancouver firm Global Fatigue Management Inc., is part of new Canuck general manager Mike Gillis’s strategy to use new technology to make his team better.
“It’s about managing fatigue levels, seeing what kind of sleep guys are getting during travel,” Gillis said before the Canucks beat the Detroit Red Wings 4-3 in overtime Thursday night.
“It will allow Global Fatigue to sit down with players and say: ‘You average X-number of hours sleep, and here is when you were most fatigued.’
“They will help each guy develop [a sleep schedule] that suits them.
“It’s educating players about fatigue and why some days they feel more tired than other days.”
Gillis said once the analysis is done, the team will be able to make informed decisions about how to minimize fatigue while travelling to keep players’ energy levels high. That might mean altering travel and meal times or adjusting practice schedules, he said.
It could mean redrawing hotel rooming lists so that a player, for example, who has trouble sleeping after a game isn’t disturbing a teammate who otherwise would be resting soundly. If sleep disorders are discovered, the team will seek treatment for those players.
Gillis even said there’s a chance the round-the-clock monitoring might turn up previously unknown medical conditions. New York Ranger draft pick Alexei Cherepanov collapsed and died this week during a game in Russia, reportedly from an undiagnosed heart condition.
“You saw in our game in Washington,” Gillis said, referring to the Canucks’ dismal 5-1 loss on Monday, “that our team just wasn’t at the physical level they’d been at before that. So we’ll go back to Global Fatigue and say: ‘This is what happened. Is there anything we could have done better?'”
Global Fatigue works with companies to prevent fatigue-related incidents in the workplace. The bracelets players are wearing look like watch bands.
“That reminds me, I better put mine on,” defenceman Mattias Ohlund said Thursday morning after emerging bare-wristed from the medical room. “I think they’re just trying to give us every advantage we can get, playing on the West Coast. After games, sometimes you have a tough time because the games end at 10 p.m. and, whether you’re at home or on the road, you eat late. So then it takes me a little time to fall asleep.”
“It makes sense,” Henrik Sedin said of the program. “Every edge you can get, it’s good. If it helps even one or two players, it’s worth it.”
Gillis has said he wants the Canucks to be among the top 10 per cent in every hockey category and in travel be the best in the NHL.
“It might seem like a small thing,” Gillis said of the fatigue study. “But it helps us get to our goal.”
© The Vancouver Sun 2008