Source :- PERTH NOW NEWS
The San Francisco 49ers have got instructions on how to prepare for the longest road trip in NFL history as they get set to depart the Bay Area for Australia for the season opener against the Los Angeles Rams next week.
They were given advice on how to eat and hydrate, what to do after arriving in Melbourne and the best options of when to sleep on the approximately 8,000-mile flight that will take about 16 hours and cross the international dateline that will make a Wednesday departure turn into a Friday arrival.
Niners defensive lineman and avid world traveller Keion White has a simple approach.
“I don’t know if you can OD on melatonin, but I’m going to try,” he said.
“Take five melatonins, go to sleep on the plane. As soon as I wake up, I’m taking five more. Just keep rolling like that.”
While some members of the 49ers organisation, including coach Kyle Shanahan, have been lamenting the season-opening trip, White is embracing it after already playing games in Germany and London earlier in his career.
He plans to watch TikTok before he arrives to get ideas of what to do and then get on public transportation and explore after team meetings on the first day to help get onto a normal sleep schedule as quickly as possible.
“If I’m up, walking around, just going to go do stuff, I’ll be up,” he said.
Just go explore. We will have meetings and everything like that, but once I do that, I’m out exploring Melbourne and getting around town.”
Both the 49ers and Rams studied the process intently in the off-season, even sending advance staffers to Australia to report back on how long it took to adjust to the time change. But they came up with far different answers leading up to the game on September 11.
The Niners will hold a light practice on Saturday, take Sunday off and then have a normal stretch of three practices on Monday through Wednesday before playing the opener on Friday morning.
They will leave right after the game and are expected to land back in the Bay Area on Friday afternoon. They then will be able to take the weekend off before preparing for the Week 2 game against Miami on September 20.
“It’s a big adjustment on the body,” Shanahan said.
“So, the recommendation for everybody has been to tell us when to go, and it’s made a lot of sense. I know how our players feel also. I was a little bit on the fence. Science wasn’t and what I was reported on and our players weren’t at all. So that helped me get off the fence.”
The Rams consulted with their own scientists and came up with the opposite approach. They will do most of their practice at home and aren’t expected to arrive in Australia until about 24 hours before the game, hoping the short stay leads to no jet lag.
The better option might not be known until after the game.
The approach by the Niners has made the past few days a whirlwind. The players got the weekend off after playing the final exhibition game on Thursday night in Las Vegas and resumed practice on Monday — the day after the roster was reduced to 53 players.
“There’s a lot behind the scenes,” general manager John Lynch said.
“Our logistics folks, our folks that work in the cafe, have just gone to tremendous lengths, our health and performance team, to make sure that we’re giving our players the best opportunity to feel right when they play down there in Australia.”
The Rams and 49ers play at the MCG on Friday September 11.
