Physical Preparation Podcast · Mike Robertson

How Elite Athletes Manage Jet Lag and Travel Fatigue to Optimize Performance with Tom Clark

·58 min·3 clips

Tom Clark defines the SCN as the body clock that regulates sleep, glucose metabolism, and inflammatory response.

1. Physical Preparation Podcast centers this episode on jet lag, travel fatigue, and elite-athlete performance with Tom Clark. 2. Tom Clark is the guest, and Mike is the host; Clark matters because he worked in Formula One and is a doctoral candidate studying jet lag, travel fatigue, and circadian disruption. 3. The episode asks what traveling athletes should actually do to protect performance when their body clock and competition schedule do not match. 4. Clark says he combined more than 80 flights a year in Formula One with research into why athletes do not apply travel strategies. 5. He describes Formula One as a sport with 20 drivers, 10 teams, and more than 1,000 employees per team, but only one human performance support person for each driver. 6. Clark explains that his early role became a “jack of all trades” position covering strength and conditioning, recovery, nutrition, and specialist referral. 7. He says his doctorate began in 2021 because the peer-reviewed literature did not translate well to applied sport settings. 8. Clark defines circadian rhythm as a 24-hour body clock in the hypothalamus, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or SCN. 9. He compares the SCN to a conductor and peripheral clocks to musicians, with food timing and exercise influencing gastric emptying, glucose metabolism, and inflammation. 10. Clark uses a cave study of a French geologist who lived underground for 60 days to show that body clocks can drift later and later without time cues. 11. He defines jet lag as the symptom cluster from rapid travel across multiple time zones and says it is like a bag that misses the plane and catches up days later. 12. He separates jet lag from travel fatigue, which he ties to passport control, red-eye flights, cramped seats, low cabin oxygen, and dehydration. 13. Clark says a late chronotype playing an East Coast game one hour earlier than usual can experience a larger adjustment than the time-zone change alone suggests. 14. He cites Edwards and colleagues, who found up to a 10% variance in 10-kilometer running performance depending on time of day. 15. He also cites Riley and colleagues, who reported decreased leg strength and reaction time after a five-hour westward shift, with leg strength taking until day seven to normalize. 16. Clark says the field gets less attention because jet lag is hard to measure, gold-standard tools are invasive, and team sports make individualization difficult. 17. He argues that some research findings are conflicting, including a 2022 review of 50,000 NBA games that found westward effects rather than eastward effects in some measures. 18. Clark says practical travel planning starts by reverse engineering the reason for travel, such as a European golf event, a Formula One race in Las Vegas, or an East Coast road game. 19. The conversation is technical but applied, with Mike steering repeated examples and Clark moving between physiology, research, and on-field decision-making. 20. Listeners who coach traveling athletes or work across time zones will get the most value; listeners wanting casual sports talk may skip it.

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