Wow. Just wow.
Think about what that means across an NFL season. This is why I’m such a strong advocate for NFL players addressing somatic load throughout the season.View quoted post on X
You cannot accumulate this level of physical, neurological, mental, and emotional stress week after week, without adequately processing it, and expect to dig yourself out of the hole once the season ends.
And the collisions are only one part of what the athlete’s system is absorbing. There’s pain and injury. Travel and disrupted sleep. The cognitive load of learning, preparing, and making decisions at extraordinary speed. The emotional demands of competition. Performance pressure, job insecurity, public scrutiny, and the constant requirement to recover quickly enough to do it again.
None of those demands exist independently of one another. The body is continually integrating all of them.
This is also why we need to expand the way we talk about recovery in professional sports. Physical recovery is incredibly important, but treating the muscles and joints doesn’t address everything the athlete has accumulated.
Recovery can’t be treated as an offseason project when the load is being accumulated every week. Athletes need opportunities throughout the season to process what their systems are absorbing, regulate after enormous physiological and psychological demands, and restore capacity before another layer of load is added.
The work of processing and recovering from those demands has to happen alongside them, especially if the goal is extending an athlete’s healthspan.
—
P.S. I train pro athletes, teams, and executives. I write about the intersection of somatics and performance. Ring the 🔔 to join the community.
