#081 - Building Stronger Women’s Basketball Athletes & Beating Travel Fatigue in College Hoops
Women’s basketball is faster and more physical than ever—athletes need real strength training, not just light circuits. Add in the grind of cross-country travel, and managing fatigue becomes critical. This post breaks down how to build power, resilience, and travel-ready performance.
In this raw and unfiltered Cardio Talk edition of the Decoding Excellence Show, I dive into two topics that are reshaping the way we think about performance in college athletics.
1️⃣ First up: The Evolution of Women’s Basketball Training. The women’s game has grown more physical, more explosive, and more demanding than ever before. Yet too often, strength coaches still program light, cautious workouts,more bands and calisthenics than barbells and heavy loads. In this conversation, I break down why that approach sells athletes short, and why the modern women’s basketball player needs real weight training, exposure to grinding lifts, and intentional preparation for the realities of elite competition. If we’re serious about preparing athletes for the court, then our training has to meet the actual demands of today’s women’s game.
2️⃣ Second: Managing Travel Fatigue in College Hoops. The reality of long flights, late nights, and back-to-back games across time zones takes a massive toll on player readiness and performance. I outline five science-backed strategies to help athletes handle travel stress: controlling light exposure, prioritizing hydration, timing meals around the body clock, moving early and often, and protecting sleep quality. These simple adjustments can give athletes the edge they need to stay sharp, recover faster, and perform when it matters most.
This ruck walk conversation is all about cutting through the fluff and talking shop,strength training that truly prepares women’s basketball athletes, and practical tools for optimizing performance on the road. No script, no edits,just real talk about what works.
Tune in, share with a fellow coach, and let’s keep pushing the field forward.
🏀 Evolution of Women’s Basketball Training
Over the last two decades, women’s basketball has transformed into a game that is faster, more physical, and undeniably more explosive. Athletes are stronger, more skilled, and expected to perform at higher intensities across longer seasons with demanding schedules. This shift has forced strength and conditioning coaches to rethink the way we prepare our players. It’s no longer enough to stick with “safe” programming,bodyweight exercises, bands, and light circuits won’t cut it. Today’s women’s basketball athletes need robust training strategies that reflect the true physical demands of their sport.
Unfortunately, there’s still a tendency in our profession to hold women’s teams back,whether intentionally or unconsciously,by underloading them in the weight room. Some coaches fall into the trap of thinking women should train with less intensity, as if they can’t or shouldn’t push heavy weight. That mindset not only limits performance, but also increases the risk of injury when athletes step onto the court against opponents who have been trained to handle contact, grind through fatigue, and produce power. The women’s game deserves the same respect and intentional preparation as the men’s side.
To truly evolve women’s basketball training, we need to embrace heavy lifting, expose athletes to real grinding efforts under the bar, and program with the same seriousness we’d apply to any elite-level sport. Developing force, improving resilience, and conditioning athletes to meet the realities of the game is our responsibility as strength coaches. When we prioritize power development, effective load management, and individualized programming, we empower athletes to rise to the challenge of today’s women’s basketball,fast, physical, and highly competitive.
✈️ Managing Travel Fatigue in College Hoops
The college basketball season is a grind, and nowhere is that more obvious than during travel. Between time zone changes, late-night flights, early morning practices, and long stretches in hotels, players are often asked to perform under conditions that work directly against their biology. Travel fatigue isn’t just about feeling tired,it’s about disrupted circadian rhythms, dehydration, poor sleep quality, and the cumulative wear and tear that dulls both body and mind. If left unaddressed, it can lead to diminished readiness, higher injury risk, and inconsistent game-day performance.
One of the keys to managing travel fatigue is proactivity. Athletes and coaches can make small but powerful adjustments before, during, and after travel that significantly improve performance outcomes. Simple strategies like controlling light exposure to sync the body clock, staying ahead of hydration needs in dry airplane cabins, and timing meals to align with local schedules all help accelerate adaptation to new environments. Likewise, encouraging movement during flights,stretching, ankle pumps, or short walks,keeps blood circulating and tissues primed for competition.
Equally important is protecting sleep quality. Tools like sleep masks, noise-canceling headphones, or neck pillows can turn chaotic travel into more restful downtime. Once at the destination, holding athletes accountable to consistent bedtime routines helps anchor circadian rhythms and speeds recovery. When combined, these small details create a big advantage,helping teams stay sharp during the toughest stretches of the season. Managing travel fatigue isn’t about eliminating stressors, but about controlling what can be controlled so athletes show up ready to compete at their best.
If you want to hear the full, unfiltered conversation, check out this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show,part of my Cardio Talk series where I take you behind the scenes of my thoughts during long ruck walks here in Boulder, Colorado.
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Key Takeaways
- Women's basketball is faster, more physical, and more explosive than ever, and light circuits, bands, and bodyweight work do not prepare athletes for those demands.
- Underloading women's teams in the weight room limits performance and raises injury risk against opponents who have been trained to handle contact, grind through fatigue, and produce power.
- Travel fatigue can be managed with five strategies: control light exposure, prioritize hydration, time meals around the body clock, move early and often, and protect sleep quality.
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Episode Transcript
This transcript was automatically generated. While we strive for accuracy, some words or phrases may be misheard.
[00:00:00] Sport science, strength and conditioning, high performance coaching, welcome to the excellence show. Hi, everybody. It is Adam Ringler and welcome back to another decoding excellence podcast. I'm your host as always. And today we're going to get into some cardio talk topics where I'm out here engaging on a beautiful sun, rise, brook walk with my 45 pound backpack through 511. And I'm hitting the trail. And today I don't have my AirPods in because they're dead. I need to charge them. That's on me. However, I do have
[00:00:53] My phone. And so today I thought I would record a quick little podcast from the cardio series that we've been doing recently on the decoding excellence show. So without further ado, let's just get right into the episode. Everybody, welcome back to the decoding excellence show. As the intro says, I'm your host, Adam Ringler, your curator of offense is interesting. Today we're going to jump into the decoding excellence show and our cardio talk, our walking talk series. This is the raw, right? Non polished, non studio mic, non studio headphones, no noise cancelling,
[00:01:30] You know, sound barriers here. How about on the trail? The cars wasn't by birds chirping in the background, dogs barking and everything in between. So if it sounds muffled, if it sounds busy, if it sounds like this car's passing me right now, it's because it is. So today, there's several different topics I want to get into. I will run through them. Now, I am also here doing, obviously, because I said in my Ruck Walk. So if I'm breathing a little heavy, you know how it goes. It is Saturday. It is beautiful out here in Boulder, Colorado. Whether it's nice and pleasant, if you will,
[00:02:11] We're kind of a fall, crisp fall morning, already two cups of coffee down through my Yeti camp mugs. So your boy is probably about 500 milligrams of caffeine through the death wish coffee and starbucks with the heat as. So well caffeinated heart rate should be jacked up completely in a high zone one, maybe low zone two. And we're going to skip right into it. So do you want to talk about a couple things here on this show. And that is the first topic being obviously, you know what I'm going to talk about women's basketball. That's what I, that's what I coach. So I want to talk about the evolution
[00:02:52] Of the game, right? So I was sitting down the other day and I was chatting with one of one of my colleagues and we were talking about, you know, really, we were talking about how the old school women's basketball shorts used to go down to the ankles. And now it seems like everything is modernized. And I was thinking about my own career and how I've merely been working with women's basketball for 20 years that blows my mind thinking about that 20 years of the game of women's basketball, how it's matured, how it's evolved, how the physicality has continued to increase
[00:03:31] Or the velocity something continued to get faster. And it makes me think it's not just the apparel that's changed. I mean, granted, even on the men's side, we all went through the long, baggy, kairi, sort of early days of everything flowing, everything big, everything down to the calves. So obviously the game is periose-changed and modernized, but the physicality and just the physical attributes the athletes have changed as well. And so the training clearly needs to change. And when you look across the landscape of trainers and coaches and PT's and basketball skill coaches
[00:04:18] Those of us that specialize in basketball, it has changed. So we know that the game is more physical. We know that refs are allowing the game to be played that way more. So my argue less, but I do think we are allowing, I mean, listen, we're not talking about the bad boys of Detroit pistons anymore, right? Like it's not just we're going to mall you every single time that you go up. It's like that part I think is undeniably different, right? The Jordan era and that era of basketball would look at the current modern landscape, or at least in the NBA and say, okay,
[00:05:02] We're protecting our stars now in this era of basketball. Sure. Okay, fully get that. What? The game is faster undeniably. It's quicker, it's more explosive, every aspect of it. I was watching clips of Michael Jordan and some of the ball movement for I forget what championship that the Bulls ended up winning. However, there was no aggressive closeouts. There was no switches on defense like it was just pretty much man the entire time with no aggressiveness on defense. Maybe that was the coaching strategy there, but however, I just look at that and say
[00:05:51] Modern day basketball is chaos of physicality and change of direction and acceleration, and we wonder why. Yeah, maybe there maybe there is more injuries in the current landscape of Korean NBA, right? And I say that only because the game has sped up, right? This quality has sped up at the intensity of the game has increased. We go back and we equate this to like modern day racing when I don't know. Listen, I'm not a NASCAR guy. I will never pretend to be one. However, you look at it and it's like maybe just listen, I'm just throwing this off
[00:06:31] The top of my head. If any of you listeners, you know, our big car guys, cool, and then correct me if I'm wrong here, right? However, maybe old school car races were won at 80 miles per hour, 90 miles per hour, right? Now cars are getting in excess of 150, you know, 175 miles per hour, Formula One's getting crazy speed. So as the engines and the mechanics and the architecture and the engineering of cars and the motors on the wheels and the mechanics improve, so too has the engineering and mechanics and all of that, the human body and the physiology and the enhancement of the game.
[00:07:17] So now I say all that about the NBA. I said that analogy about the NASCAR and Formula One. Let's bring it back to women's basketball. The game has evolved and to play at the levels of competing for national championship, competing for W and B.A. Championship, then we too need to evolve the training, the intensity, the methodologies, all of this of the strength conditioning for women's basketball and for women, just naturally, let's just full stop right there for women. Now, I say this as a position of a strength coach that has worked his entire career
[00:08:14] In women's basketball, right? From the early 2000s, working with women's basketball to 20 years later, 25 years later, almost at this point, and how the game has changed, and how athletes have changed. But we as strength coaches also need to change as well.
[00:08:37] So as I look across the industry, and we look across the highest level of women's basketball or what's needed to be successful, the style of play, the physicality of play, the aggressiveness of play, the intensity of play. So too is our preparation from a strength conditioning perspective needs to mirror all of those intensities in that physicality and the aggressiveness.
[00:09:06] So while we respect that, and those really rudimentary needs analysis of what we observe in the game and what we observe and strengthen conditioning, I guess where I find a disconnect is that so often, so often, the physical preparation needs for women's basketball from a strength conditioning perspective is being handled and treated as if they are needed to be treated with kids' loves. Here's a band program. Here's a 15-pound dumbbell program. Here's a movement flow program. Here's a basic calisthenic program. And listen, I understand the fact that there's a,
[00:09:59] Yes, systemic underdevelopment issue with just women in general, young girls in general, when it comes to strength conditioning. Most adolescent males can get involved in high school, in junior high, with a strength conditioning program through men's basketball, through baseball, through soccer, through football, certainly through football, through physical education programs, PE programs. But we as an industry of strength coaches and high school strength coaches and physical educators, we need to have that same emphasis on, I'll say, young girls,
[00:10:44] And their adolescence development program because by the time they get to me as a strength coach in a college setting, I'm hoping to take them places with their physicality, that mere requirements necessary to be successful, to compete for and win national championships. And I will be, quite frankly honest, the intensities and loads that they will face, the volumes that they will face, the duration of basketball that they will face, the physicality of basketball that they will face. It's not going to be prepared through basic body weight calisthenics and band programs.
[00:11:31] At some point, they're going to grip a barbell. They're going to get some weight on their back. They're going to have to pick some weight off the floor. They're going to have to push some weight off their chest. They're going to have to do, yeah, basic calisthenics and by weight movements, whole ups, chin ups, rows, all that. But with some external load, why? Why? Why? Well, it's because
[00:11:53] They need to physically assert dominance in their space in order to be successful, right? Somebody's going to invade their space and they must defend their space. And maybe this is the old school strength coach in me. But we need to win that three foot by three foot battle of their physical proximity and space every single time. And it doesn't happen by being able to do light band and light body weight calisthenics. It happens by being the strongest person in that space, the most explosive person in that space, the meanest person in that space, the toughest person in that space.
[00:12:41] And I don't think that gets developed anymore. I mean, it certainly does now, nowadays. But 20 years ago, when we first started, programs were the most vanilla basic programs. There were a second thought. There were an afterthought. They were regurgitated men's programs that had no maybe considerations for the anatomical differences of women, the injury mechanisms and or predispositions for women, athletics, the game differences between Vince basketball, boys basketball, and women's basketball,
[00:13:26] Girls basketball at that point. So because there are quite thematic differences in the style of play, right? You see it. You see it certainly advertised on ESPN, right? You hear journalists talk about the differences between men's basketball and women's basketball, the explosive nature of men's basketball, the fact that, you know, centers and bigs, guard play can slash through the rim and dunk the ball into the women's games, settles from other layups. The general, I think,
[00:14:02] Character, characterization of the differences between the two men's you can have a more dominant one to two player that can really change the game where women's is more system-based basketball. So relying on more system team pass, pass cut system oriented success, right? You get one to three dominant players on your men's basketball team, and that can take you places, right? One to two dominant players on the women's side, guess what? You still need teammates around you to make you successful because it's team basketball, right? System basketball. So I love that because it
[00:14:43] Emphasizes teamwork. It emphasizes no one person is bigger than the system, right? Um, well, we killed with this Jerry Cross sort of quote, right? Where he ends up, I just watched the last ants like, I don't know, two months ago and one month ago, it was my second or third or rewatch of it and he talks about how he got brutalized in the media. Oh, stars don't win basketball games, organizations too, right? I'm not saying that. I am not saying that, but what I do think the women's basketball game is stars win basketball games, right? You athletes win basketball
[00:15:26] Games. Hard stop, full stop, full period right there, but on the women's side, teams win basketball games, right? That's the one difference I would make. Jerry Cross says organizations, listen, you need to have the right GMs, the right coaches, the right athletic trainers. As a support staff, I'll say the right strength conditioning staff, performance staff, all of that stuff, right? But none of us stood up. None of us shoot the basketball. None of us make that game time read and decision. It's the man in the arena. It's the woman in the arena that wins basketball games,
[00:16:05] Right? And so so much so it's the teams that win basketball games. All right, so we've talked about the needs for enhanced training, i.e. A greater level of detail, attention, focus, dedication for women's basketball. Also, I need to not treat them like they're little girls, right? These are strong badass women competing to play at the highest level in a strength coach. I just think we need to make sure that our coaching, our intensity, our program design treats them like that. Listen, they don't need to be deadlifting 65 pounds off the floor. Like, no, no, I'm just saying,
[00:16:50] Like, maybe if that's where they start at, cool. Okay, but we also have, we owe them to find where their ceiling is, not their floor. And what I mean by that is, okay, we're doing this assessment, where we're starting our training process. And this kid has never trained to be for. And we're going to do a trap, our deadlift. Maybe the prudent, responsible thing is, depending that they have the biomechanical ability to achieve those positions and core stability, ankle and thoracic spine mobility to get all in these positions, right?
[00:17:29] And maybe you start them 65 pounds here. I just need to see one to three reps of this. All right, that looks good. What about 95 pounds? Okay, that looks good. What about 135 pounds? Okay, that looks great. You know, you didn't have positional breakdown. Let's move up to 185 pounds, 225. Keep moving up to 75, 315. Okay, let's start on some more weight. Let's go, uh, 335. Let's start building, right? We owe it to them. To be able to allow them to find their ceiling, not just their floor. So,
[00:18:02] All right, have beaten this topic to death. Let's move on. I do want to talk about something, and maybe this will be my last topic for this short, Ruck Walk. This is a Saturday Ruck Walk. Now, we've already talked about how Tuesday, Thursdays and the weekends, I try to go for longer rucks, somewhere in the vicinity of 60 to 80 minutes, hour and a half, certainly over an hour. Lately, I've been really pushing my Sunday rucks to be closer to two hours, hour and a half for sure. And I've been pulling back a little bit on these Saturdays. And that's just based on
[00:18:42] The opportunity that I have to spend with my family. So Saturdays are a real big family day for me, for us, right? We've been having a series of off days on the weekends with women's basketball, I love it. Right before we start to get into 20-hour weeks and, you know, Saturdays, recruiting, and all the busyness of travel and essentially getting prepared for the season. So right now, in preseason, we've been certainly doing these weekends off, which I love. However, if I get this time where my kids are off school, my wife is off from her work, I'm off.
[00:19:20] We want to do stuff as family. So I've been pulling back a little bit on Saturday morning walks just to not monopolize the morning. So I can be a little bit more present with the family. And I talked about that on one of the podcasts, or I think it was one of our former athletes society, my private community groups that I have for only former college athletes. So if you're listening to this podcast and you're interested in Coach, how do I get this type of information? I want to learn about optimizing my life, my health, my performance, my nutrition, my hydration
[00:19:52] And all of the qualities and characteristics and habits and disciplines needed to be successful along after my playing days over. That's what the former athlete society is all about. You'll find links in the show notes because I certainly advertise the former athlete's society and all of these podcasts. However, you can also head over to my website. It's my first and last name, Adam Ringler.com, forward slash former athlete society, all one big long word. And you'll find all of the information, how to join, what it's about,
[00:20:21] What I offered, one-on-one group calls, one-on-one calls, group calls, accountability calls, Q&A calls, master classes as well. So you'll find all that information there. That's that. I do want to move on to our second topic, right, for this shorter walk, like I was mentioning, one of which I can get back to my family and have a nice little hopefully day up in the mountains. And the second topic that I want to discuss today is centered around controlling variables and repercussions of travel. Now, basketball programs travel coast to coast across the
[00:21:06] Country, east versus west, west versus east, changing time zones. It is craziness sometimes. I think of some of the old Pactual schools that joined the big 10 that could be traveling from the west coast all the way across the nation to the east coast. So this is a real thing, right? How do we manage that travel fatigue in college hoops, time zones and late flights, getting home in 1 a.m., hotel life, right? How does this all affect performance and readiness? And then what can we do about it as performance coaches? Listen, we've moved on from the old
[00:21:48] Status of, we're, hey, man, we're strength and conditioning coaches. It's only strength, it's only conditioning for those two buckets. That's us. If it's not, that's somebody else. No, you know this, right? Modern day, strength and conditioning as we used to call our vocation or performance coaches, anything, anything that touches their basketball performance as in our purge view, nutrition, hydration, recovery, readiness, obviously strength and conditioning, sure, pre-hab injuries, a little tenonitis, things like that, things that would fall, performance
[00:22:22] Anxieties, things that would fall in other people's buckets, has a effect on their performance. And if they affects their basketball performance, it is well within our wheelhouse to either help channel those people into the right buckets, the right vocations, the right professionals, right, to delegate those things to the right professional. Much like your primary care physician, your general family doctor would say, whoa, hey, I just checked you out and this looks like you have, you need to go see an oncologist, you need to go see a ear nose and throat specialist, you
[00:23:02] Need to see, you guys get my drift, right? So I would say we are the family doctor, we are the PCP primary care physician of performance and certainly we refer out to more specialized people, PT's, massage therapists, athletic trainers, clinical sports psychologists, your register dieticians, you guys get the drift, right? So let's get back on TARAC with talking about this sort of fatigue related to travel. Now also we know this cardio talk, I'm right next to the road, I'm finalizing the last maybe 10 minutes of my Ruck Walk back home. This is where you
[00:23:46] Up here, the majority of the cars in this walk and talk. So I do try to apply just naturally on the software, I don't do a bunch of editing, but I do have a filter that just tries to isolate out my voice, so hopefully the cars aren't super present, but if they are, that's what we all get. We're doing two birds with one stone, getting the Ruck Walk in recording this podcast. Now, what can we do about it? If this late night travel affects our performance, it affects their performance. What are some strategies that we can do? Well, number one, we can work on trying to
[00:24:21] Control lighting. Now I get clowned, I'm sure, because I wear my red light blocking glasses, my wind down shades through Roka and Dr. Andrew Huberman, anytime that we get past 637 o'clock. So late night flights, red light, I'm throwing those shades on, your body and your internal clock. Let's just say that's tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, ticking away inside you. It's heavily influenced my light. I've done so many podcasts on this already. So a lot of the things I try to do is in the mornings when our athletes are waking up, right? I try to get them outside,
[00:24:58] If we can go ahead while we're waiting for, you know, breakfast in the club lobby. I try to take them for a sunrise walk or at least get them outside, you get some sun exposure, five to ten minutes before breakfast is served, if we can. And that tends to help set our biological clock, right? It allows us to get on the same rhythm, wouldn't we see from an ocular standpoint when our eyes get exposure to sunlight, sets our biological rhythm, our biological is a cadium rhythm clock. Then in the evenings, when we're again, maybe it's dinner time and we're watching late night film,
[00:25:41] Can we rely on printed paper copies of the scout, right? So that we're not getting so much blue light exposure. Can we dim the lights a little bit? Can we dim the projector a little bit? Can we soften the hue and the bright stimulatory effects of computer screens and phone devices? Can we get off phones, right? All of those things can actually help shift that circadian rhythm, right? Obviously, not everybody needs to go out and invest in the roca of wind-out shades, but I do advocate for blue light blocking glasses. We have yet to provide them full stop for the entire team,
[00:26:17] But things like flux and stalling that on your computer, utilizing your MacBooks night shift and soft in the hue of your phones. I have an accessibility filter on my phone when I triple-click my right phone button that it shifts it all into red. So I cut out some of the blue light that will have a softer, less stimulatory blue light effect on my phone. These are all strategies that we can recommend and are well-documented online. PubMed to that research gate where you can actually find some of this stuff. A second strategy is just simply hydration, right? Prioritizing proper hydration,
[00:26:55] Electrolytes, right? Magnesium, sodium, potassium, right? We know that airplane cabins are dry and sort of dehydration machines, if you will, and they're worse than fatigue. So as you're doing longer flights across the country, we should be prioritizing hydration, but also handing out electrolyte packets prior to getting on the plane so that they can drink the electrolyte mixed water on the plane, right? Now the stewardess will probably come around and say, hey, would you like would you like this beverage? Would you like that beverage? What can you give? But again, I like to
[00:27:31] Provide our athletes with electrolytes, so whether it's salt, S-A-L-T-T, as a supplement, or if it's drip drop, if it's trying to think of some of the other ones, scratch labs that we utilize, whether it's uh, boy, I'm missing the last one that we often use. Why am I missing that? Nonetheless, you guys get the idea, right? We should stay hydrated, both before flirting the plane, sipping water, consistently while we're on the plane, and making sure that our hydration is uh, it's topped up. Now, right? We know that altitude dehydrates athletes, so if we can, we're talking about women's
[00:28:12] Athletics, we're talking about women's basketball players, so we can't avoid some of the caffeine use, i.e. Hotel or airport or, you know, your FOA or the FBO, sorry, rather, the FBO coffee and caffeinated Starbucks drinks, that too would also be a wise addition or a habit to add. What else? Right? We could talk about meal planning, right? Strategically timing our meals. So, again, we know that eating in alignment to the clock or local time that you're at is probably a smart idea, right? So, again, it helps set the body's flock. So, if we're mountain time and we're going out
[00:29:00] To the east coast time and our breakfast, lunches, our dinners in a multi-team event, an NDE type of tournament or something, if we know that our meals are all still set on mountain time, because that's what, when we're hungry, we're never really shifting at least acutely into the time zone that we're going to be competing in. And that's not what the water athletes need, well fed, well hydrated, glycogen sources topped off when it matters the most prior to a game, and certainly after training or after a game so that we can rapidly start the recovery process as well. So, you know, I'd also say
[00:29:42] Things as simple as a lighter, more protein-rich breakfast trying to rival. Again, just trying to get some nutrients in avoiding super heavy meals late at night. So, there's times where, you know, in the past prior to a lot of these interventions, we've finished a game and be 9.30 at night, or eating something like super heavy, like that's going to sit in your body. Your body's going to be working to digest that really hard as you're also trying to sleep. And that's a recipe for elevated resting part rates, your HRV tanking and deep sleep actually getting, you know,
[00:30:18] Decimated by that heart rate beating to try to digest that food in our stomach and digestive system. Moving often, right, getting up off the plane, moving around throughout the cabin when possible. Again, protein, like long prolonged sitting on long cross-country flights, right, decreases circulation, decreases circulation, doesn't deliver blood flow throughout our body. That can stiffen muscles, we know that. So, again, just encouraging athletes to get up, stretch, move around, do some light mobility throughout the cabin, walk through the bathroom, come back,
[00:30:51] Think of it as like tag, like hey man, on this flight, we got a two and a half hour flight, I need you to get up, stretch a little bit, go tag the bathroom, you know, do that twice, three times, four times. Yes, you're going to annoy the other people on the plane. If it's a commercial flight, that's fine, who cares? If it's us in a chartered flight, just get up and move around. It's a chartered flight, nobody cares, right? So, doing those things are all helpful for your body. What else? What else? I think you got one more maybe recommendation
[00:31:21] To tackle. And then maybe lastly, let's just talk about this, protecting your sleep quality, right? I could do a whole show on this, but travel tools, right? There's a whole commercial product called Flight Kit that essentially takes all these individualized products, combines it, aggregates it into one kit, i.e. Like a like a med kit for flight, right? Vitamins, electrolytes, all the things I'm going to recommend, but going out and getting a simple i-mask, right? I did a show on the former athlete's society podcast and video tutorials on YouTube.
[00:31:59] You can find me at youtube.com forward slash Adam Ringler, first and last name as always, but I did it. I'm a big fan of the anti-sleep mask. That's probably my favorite sleep mask or eye cover, right? So, I travel with two of those, one of which is Bluetooth, the other is just a simple one, super soft, super lightweight, super breathable. Things like noise canceling headphones so that you can relax. All of these things can actually help you sleep. I travel with black electrical tape so that I can tape up any of my ambient light in my room from a alarm clock through LED, you know,
[00:32:38] Illuminative light bulbs in the hotel room that you really can't control. I just throw on a black piece of electrical tape over the top of it. That seems to help lock that out. And then in combination with the i-mask, I get nothing. So my room is super cold. I always set the thermostat as cold as it possibly can go. Sometimes don't tell the hotels. I punch in the thermostat code. You can find those online hacks for that. How to sort of bypass the governor and a lot of those thermostats, get it back down. You know, they may limit you at 70 degrees or 65 degrees and that can go in and bypass that and
[00:33:14] Get it down to about 60 degrees. I do that quite often. But I try to make my room as dark as cold as possible and that helps protect my sleep quality as well. All right, I'm finishing up this ruck walk. I'm actually at my porch at this moment. So this would be a good time to stop the show. I appreciate every single one of you listening. And until next time, stay tuned. I appreciate you.
[00:33:40] Hey, everybody. That's going to be it for this podcast. As always, if you missed any of the episodes here in the Decoding Excellence Show, you can go and explore the back catalog. I host all of our episodes. Not only aren't every sort of podcast hosting site, whether it's Spotify or whether it's a YouTube or anywhere else, but you can go to my website. It is adambringer.com forward slash podcasts. From there, you can listen to all of the interviews, whether it's other sport professionals, whether it's the monologues, whether it's the basketball discussions, or the sport science intent.
[00:34:16] Go to the website, check it out. Listen to the podcast. I'm telling you, you will take something away from the back catalog of the Decoding Excellence Show. Now, one of the ways that you can support this show. Now, there's two. Really, you could go to adambringer.com forward slash newsletter. You can sign up for my newsletter. And in this, you're going to get access to everything, the cool things that I discover from a monthly basis, new books I'm reading, things I'm discovering, articles that I found related to sport science. That's really cool and coaching. So,
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