Tom Clark - Mitigating the Effects of Jet Lag

Hi guys, it's Ani Mdonnold and welcome to the inform performance podcast. On today's show, I'm speaking to Tom Clark. Tom is a performance coach who has extensive experience supporting drivers in both Formula One and Cross Motor sports. He is also the CEO and the founder of Phase. In this conversation with Tom, we unpick his specialist interest in jet lag and how to minimise the effect it has on performance. Tom dives into a great level of detail on both the biology and the interventions that he considers when travelling with athletes. I hope you enjoy the episode. This podcast is proudly partners with Game Plan Performance. Elite Sport runs fast but rehab management doesn't always keep up. Every department has its tools, every practitioner has their preferences, but returns to play as a shared responsibility without a shared system. 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I'll skip over the unnecessary bits, but I guess the relevant parts and probably a kin to much of your audience. Sports science, undergrad and postgraduate degree from there was looking at the wider world and understanding what does the career look like and very much from those type of studies I wanted to try and transition into working with professional athletes. I'd always been a really big fan of Formula One and motorsport in general and was very interested in trying to embark on a career in that particular sport. The problem was there was no obvious opportunities. There wasn't necessarily a company or a network or a way in which I could go and work in that sport. At this time, it's probably the early 2010s. Twitter was probably in its heyday and you could look at maybe what some coaches were doing and I saw the sport in one or two that were active in Formula One and managed to reach out to them and understand a little bit more about what goes on in the sport. From there, I actually managed to look around and search high and low for opportunities. I found a gym that was based next to London Gatwick Airport and this gym specialised in the physical prep side of supporting racing drivers. I managed to get an opportunity there and was kind of let loose straight away out of university so I was given the keys to the gym and basically everyone that came through those doors was under my supervision and very much a wide reaching role. I'm multifaceted, so physical prep, soft tissue, therapy, nutrition etc. I felt quite significantly out of my depth. I was working hard trying to understand where my gaps were working with other people and other sports as well alongside and just trying to learn about the sport because at this time we didn't have much in the way of quality peer reviewed research. I'm working with drivers from go carts up to Formula 2 level and everything in between. There's not really a standard per se in terms of what level these guys and girls should be at from a physical prep perspective. Very much learning on the go and eventually I got an opportunity to start supporting some of these athletes at races. So again, very multifaceted role, everything that fell under sorry, the sort of performance and well-being umbrella inherently became my responsibility and again just trying to learn as much as I can while on the fly. And then in 2018 I got my first opportunity to work in Formula 1 directly. I'd already worked with a number of athletes that had made it to F1 so I had an understanding of what drivers needed to be doing but then I was travelling to every Formula 1 race supporting one of the athletes in this what is term to performance coaching role. And so again this kind of jack of all trades master of none but very much approaching it from a perspective of bringing in experts in different areas to help support me as the person on the ground supporting this athlete. And generally Formula 1 is that sport where you've got 24 races at the moment across 23 countries, 5 continents constantly on the move and because of the logistic restraints there's generally just one performance coach for each of the now 22 Formula 1 drivers which is a bit backwards when you think there's over a thousand employees per Formula 1 team and only one person per Formula driver when we consider how important the driver is in that whole scenario it's quite amazing that that's the way around it is but that's what we're working with and that's largely been my career right up to December of this year where I finally left that role so I've had over 12 years in that sport and loved every minute of it. It's been a phenomenal experience and insight into a world that I dreamed of working in. Yeah and it sounds like you had a really good formative experience in that kind of earlier role in a sort of gym there got where got because I think if you work in you know at least in the UK if you work in say football or rugby you're spoiled for choice in terms of the number of teams and leagues and therefore kind of like junior opportunities for academies and age groups that you can get into to work your way up to the you know the big league if you want to call it that versus I can imagine Formula 1 short of having quite rare places like that that doesn't have that breeding ground for coaches you sort of either in it or you're not I'd imagine for the most part. Exactly that and I think one thing that was interesting with my sort of upbringing and sort of almost launch into professional sport and a practitioner role is I went straight into self-employment so I didn't go into your typical team sport environment where you're sort of a junior and you're working under lots of people and I guess it's always a case of it's a grass is greener type scenario I'm sure there's people in team sports that would have loved the freedom that I had but I was looking at it almost from maybe an insecurity perspective of like God I've got no one to learn under and I think that's a that's a very much a unique kind of component to my sort of start in this sort of coaching capacity and I'm very grateful for that because in Poster syndrome I'm a firm believer of can be very positive and I certainly felt like at most points in my career that I had that and that was actually my drive to actually try and find out more and try and wherever I could learn under other people but yeah like you say it's not the saturated sport that perhaps many sports suffer from it's it's still very hard to get opportunities but at that particular time there wasn't a vast array of coaches doing what I was doing so you could quickly find the people that were doing it and they immediately almost pay became your compatriots and colleagues and I think that helped drive a lot of what are now understanding is of that sport so many of my friends and colleagues have sort of written the textbooks and have had light into the peer review papers in this area because it was not long after that I got involved in these sort of things start really accelerating and Formula One has become even more global than it was before and we've got things like the Netflix program which have given everyone an insight into what kind of goes on which is new to a lot of people and it's sort of broadened it as a appealing sport to the masses and yeah it's there's now a lot of people that want to try and work and it has such. Yeah, definitely glamorizes, I'm sure, and overlooks the parts of the sport that I know will be brutal, travel wise. I've enjoyed this vibe, it's great, right? Because every five to ten minutes, it cuts to an entirely different continent, country, place, time zone, obviously. I know you've got a big interest in jet lag, and it's not shocking where that might have here, where that might have come from. But I'd love to know why you, obviously, I know you've been very exposed to jet lag as a performance, something that can have an impact on performance. But can you, could I talk for you, like, what about jet lag? It is that you find interesting, and it sounds obvious, but why does it matter to you? Yeah, so for me, I was in this sort of multifaceted performance coaching role, trying to understand the problems that my athletes were facing. Most of those were sort of addressed very, I guess, typically, like you would spend time with a rehab specialist if you had a particular concern around a particular type of injury, or you're just trying to learn how other sports do certain things. When I started, when I actually started in Formula One, I got a bit of education in jet lag by an expert in the area, and I was then reading around in the area of sleep in general. This is, again, late 2010s at this point, probably 2017-2018, and sleep has become a more well-understood thing that performance stakeholders are taking an interest in. I was reading a lot and sort of seeing this process see that kept rearing its heads in sleep research, which is the circadian system. Often, when we look at a paper that references sleep or jet lag, we will talk about process S, which is this homeostatic drive for sleep or sleep pressure, and then this process sees at the circadian system. I guess it was that initial reading combined with my interest of then this form of circadian disruption called jet lag that allowed me or sort of pushed me to want to read more. The more I read and asked around, the more that I saw this discrepancy between what we would perhaps read in a paper and then what was applied in the real world. Also, I saw that there was a lot of gaps in the research and that led to me starting my professional doctorate in 2021 in jet lag, travel fatigue in elite sport, because I just felt based on personal interest and nothing more. I felt that this would probably accelerate what I could provide my athletes more than say anything else that I was looking at at that time. Yeah. I guess the key question is how do you assess it? I think jet lag is one of those things that probably in quite a trivial way to someone with your knowledge, we've all experienced and have our own idea or misconceptions of what it is, what it's not. Rumors of things that help it, I'm sure you've been asked lots of trivial questions about sunglasses, red light therapy, all sorts of products and gadgets that you can wear on a plane. I'd just love to know like from a kind of scientific and practitioner lens as well. How do you assess it? We've got athletes or coaches that are going to be experiencing jet lag. How do you sort of monitor it, assess it and look at it? Yeah, I guess the best place to start is a bit of a mechanistic understanding of how jet lag occurs. So we've got this master clock known as the superchiasmatic mucus or SCN for short, which is located in the hyperfalamus situated above the optic chalcem. So we've got this body clock, this endogenous clock that regulates everything from our sleepwakes cycle to essential living functions. And the most popular, if you like circadian rhythm, for most people, the one that they always think about is the sleepwakes cycle. So you've got this body clock, the SCN, and that's like your conductor in an orchestra. And then your musicians are kind of like your peripheral clocks, which reside in almost every cell in the human body. And these are entrained by this master clock, but things like food, time, in exercise, light and more have an influence. So in the case of sleep, that would be very much the case there that other things can also influence them. But fundamentally and importantly, and else a sink clock can lead to what's known as circadian disruption. Because this is all leads to and is very well documented in impairing markers of health, and physical and mental performance. Some examples of a type of circadian disorder or disruption are shift work disorder, social jet lag, and then jet lag. All of them have relevance and are very much, much of the same thing. There's just bits of nuance that kind of separate them and I'll come to that in a short while. But how do they happen fundamentally? Well it comes from this body caught getting out of sync with time cues. And otherwise known as the light gavers, a German word meaning time giver. So we have many different zeitgabers, exercise, socializing, eating. But the one that's perhaps most documented and well understood from having a big influence is light. So that would be light from the sun and electronic sources of light. And mis-times cues with the body clock is what leads to these circadian disruptions. So now jumping into jet lag, jet lag is defined as the catalogous symptoms associated with rapid travel over multiple time zones caused by this sluggish adjustment of the body clock to the timing of the new environment. So it's the body, the human physical body, then get in mis-times cues, which is causing this desynchronization. So in the form of jet lag, you're seeing light, you're exercising, you're eating at the times that your body is fundamentally not used to. And this leads to symptoms from a jet lag perspective of impaired physical, mental performance or mood disturbed sleep, which is kind of the obvious one increased fatigue and even things like gut irregularities. But we can use these zeitgabers, these time cues to actually entrain our clocked, actually minimized jet lag as well. So if we take control of the time cues, we can actually manage jet lag better. Now critically, jet lag is only possible when we travel in an east or west direction. Generally speaking, over two or more time zones in an east or west direction known as transmaridian travel. If we were to jump on a plane and maybe travel from a central US state down to certain parts of South America, we might be on the plane for 10 plus hours, but we might not necessarily cross many time zones, maybe less than two. So we wouldn't have typical jet lag in that scenario. What we would have is huge amounts of travel fatigue more than likely. Now travel fatigue is a separate phenomena to jet lag and it's defined as the non-spore. It's loosely defined as the non-specific response to the hassles of travel. So I think most people that have jumped on a plane would have experienced this. It's your cue at passport control. It's the stress of visas and it's running late for your flight. It's the one you get on the plane. It doesn't get any better because you've got a cramped seat. I'm six foot four. So I'm quite used to sort of folding myself into that tiny seat. It's the hypoxic environment we find ourselves in with the fact that we've got a pressurized air cabin and generally less oxygen in the air. So that's going to increase our need for more fluid replacements. And all of these things contribute to a level of acute fatigue. But the good thing we're travel fatigue relative to jet lag is a good night's deep in the new environment generally will dissipate most symptoms. So if you can set yourself up well, minimize the stresses as much as you possibly can and then get a good night's sleep when you arrive, most of that travel fatigue should have hopefully dissipated. And that's the key difference between travel fatigue and jet lag because jet lag is not the same. We would expect a climatisation rate of around half a time zone to one time zone, possibly up to 1.5 time zones per day when we're shifting in an easterly direction. So what that means is if we're travelling over say three time zones, we might take up to as many as six days to actually fully acclimatise to that time zone. Now that's perhaps not assuming that we're putting things in place to be able to sort of less than the blow. But also sleep is usually the thing people think about most with jet lag. So if I'm sleeping well, I've got no jet lag and that's the common train of thought. My problem with the stereotypical sort of jet lag scenarios is we're not usually thinking about the full picture and I see this in post for a lot. So I'm going to give you a case study example, taken athlete that is travelling tomorrow, one time zone eastwards. So they could be in a central US state travelling to say New York or on the east coast or someone perhaps in the UK travelling. to Paris, France, same scenario. So you look on paper as the coach, maybe, okay, we've got one time zone, Eastwood direction. That's no jet lag. So we're all good there. We have a got to think about the circadian system much. But I'm going to throw in a few other things. So we know that this particular athlete has got a late chronotype. You've run a gold standard questionnaire, maybe the the composite morning questionnaire or morning evening, this questionnaire and you understand that this athlete is an evening type couple with that you understand as well that they're a gamer. They like playing their Xbox or PlayStation until one to in the morning. So the next day arrives and you jump on that flight and that athlete arrives in this Eastwood time zone, which is earlier in the day when we travel Eastwood, we make the day earlier thrown into the mix as well. The game time is also two hours earlier than the athlete is used to. So now we've moved two hours further in terms of when his body is going to have to get his or her body for that matter. It's going to have to perform in that given time zone. So whilst we haven't seen classic jet lag, we've got this circadian disruption cocktail of both social jet lag and jet lag. So for clarity, social jet lag is generally speaking the desynchronization between your work and it's kind of study schedule and your free time. And this social jet lag, plus jet lag has created more of these circadian disruption type symptoms. Only they've gone under the radar because of this case that we're only traveling over one time zone. So this is where a lot of my passion for the area has come from because a lot of us are not maybe looking at it through this lens. And then it gets kind of more interesting still when you look at dional performance across the day. So what I mean by that is we look at her say a marker of performance, whether it mental or physical and understand how it varies across the day. So testing multiple times a day, controlling from many different variables. And to give a few examples, there was one of the earlier studies by Atkinson and Spires found that tennis serve accuracy dropped off in the morning to the afternoon, but tennis serve velocity improves across the day. And when we look at about why that might be, generally the thought was that because core body temperature, we'd increase generally for most of us across the day. If we're living on a normal sort of schedule because core body temperature is an indirect marker of the body clock, we would generally see it highest in the late afternoon early evening. That made sense for maybe why serve velocity was at highest later in the day. But then for accuracy, so maybe that sort of concentration and focus component, we know that this can often drop off at sort of the early afternoon point due to sleep pressure that rise in a denysine. So we've got some insight there as to the impact within one time zone. And there's a lot of different studies that have supported this very phenomenon in many different circumstances. So another study, volunteer and colleagues tested repeated sprint ability and in males and found that nearly all markers of performance were improved from a repeat sprint perspective in that early evening period again. So following core body temperature. But other areas, so complex decision making, there's a general theme that there's a drop off after the morning, early afternoon period, which a lot of us are very familiar with. We know as well that chronotype has an impact. So in a lot of these studies, morning people generally adapt worse to afternoon and evening activity. So with all these things combined, we recognize that there's a lot to consider when we jump over time zones that doesn't necessarily change the picture completely because all of these things clearly apply when we're in a single time zone, but they become much less clear when we jump east or west, even just by a single time zone. So that's a bit of a tangent, but it's kind of a lot of the mechanisms behind this area. And one of the reasons why I'm so passionate about it and also how I believe it's really going under the radar with a lot of different sports and athletes. 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And if you're a team based on the East Coast, Central, West Coast, different schedules, different location that their home games, different away games, schedules, probably very different levels of exposure and whether it's going to have a good impact relative to other teams or not. I'll bring this home in a minute, I know this is a wild tangent. We're always really interested in neuromuscular fatigue. I'm quite often doing wellness questionnaires and counter movement jumps on force plates and just looking at okay, outlier scores, it are they for teed, all these kind of like common things. I'm sure this is a really overly simplified question, but is there any sort of like rules of thumbs that you think about in terms of what might be a normal-ish level of decline in neuromuscular fatigue in these kind of common ways that we might assess it relative to each time zone that you cross. And I'm sure that varies, per-assly, I'm sure it depends on all these different nuances, but is there any sort of like quick and dirty rules of fun where you sort of say one time zone 10% or whatever it is? Yeah, no, I guess I need to refrain from the very easy answer, which is it depends because that's yeah, it's always our it's our least favourite when we're asking these questions. But to give you some like overview of this, there's a lot of, or not a lot, but there's a few good studies which have reviewed like mass data sets from the big American sport leagues. And these are really interesting studies because you've got the US which is separated from East to West Coast in terms of like a three hour time span. So we've got some classic jet lag scenarios there. We've also got lots of different sports, so they've got like NBA and MLB, they travel a hell of a lot, NFL slightly less so and there's a lot yeah, I would highly advise people go away and try and have a read of some of these studies because they're really interesting. In particular, one that springs some minds by Glynski and I forget the second or for bits, a US based study group in 2022. They looked at the NBA and they found that free-fro-shooting when traveling from East to West Coast was decreased. So there was a 1% or 0.8% performance loss which wasn't statistically significant, which I think is interesting again because if you present those numbers to a coach, they're still going to want to like know about that. That particular study did show statistical significance though when they removed the players that took the most free-froze. So if you took out your LeBron James's at this world and you're starting players and then focused on just the players that were sort of only taking a couple of shots a game, that then became statistically significant at over 1.3% I think it was if I remember rightly. So why would that have been? So in this particular scenario, the authors thought that because, effectively, those East Coast teams traveling westwards were basically competing at a time that was even later than what they were used to. They were basically competing at almost a biological time equivalent at midnight. So they passed that period where we might see sort of peak levels of performance and actually for good measure they've probably got some some sleep pressure thrown in there as well. So coming back to your question more directly I guess we can do things like counter movement jumps on arrival we can even do like an RPE rating of a particular like movement or exercise whatever it may be. The problem is as we know performance is so complex and a single score can have so many contributing variables wherever it's nutritional to do with the level of warm up. Just the psychological side alone is going to be like there's so much to unpack there isn't there. So we. can't really generalize. And I think that's also because of if we go back to that example, I gave earlier of the late evening chronotype that's got to travel one time zone esports and then the earlier game. For that person, they're probably going to have some red flags in some of their school data or they might do. But if you've got the early morning type who is getting up red early, maybe they're young parent as well, so they have to get up early anyway. They may even thrive in that same scenario. So it's not like you can look at an athlete and say, okay, this is the trend that we're seeing here. So let's apply like a widespread protocol. And I think that's one of the tricky bits from some of the peer reviewed work to then the application. And we don't have too many people in this space that have kind of, yes, there are some applied research here, but trying to actually work with athletes and understand coaches and understand the impact is quite tricky in this space. And I guess like, so you end up in this situation where it's inevitable, you're traveling east or whatever the travel situation is. And you know, they're going to either the athlete and the coaches are going to accumulate some jet lag. How do you intervene? And I think this is probably the key thing everyone's ever listening. It's the so what question, okay, so we know it happens. What do you do? And I think this answer will probably underpin why a lot of people probably feel like they don't do that much because the reality is we can't measure the body clock directly. We have to look at indirect markers. So we've talked about one indirect marker of the body clock already. And that's core body temperature. The problem we've getting gold standard sort of core body temperature readings, which you will need to do to identify, for example, if the body clock has shifted at all or to what severity of jet lag you might have or other forms of circadian misalignment. You're going to have to use something like core body temperature pills or a rectal thermometer. And even one of them is particularly practical and quite evasive. So in veribur, we end up not using these objective markers to identify maybe the sort of we don't approach in the same way we would approach a lot of other sort of considerations, right? So we then move to subjective means. So question is and that's probably the that single word there is probably the bayonet flight a lot of coaches lives because there is no end of questionnaire that all of us would like to use irrespective of like your skillset and bias. The problem is clearly with dealing with like athletes and the time that they have and willingness to want to complete something. And the gold standard sort of jet lag question air, which is generally perceived to be the Liverpool jet lag question air, is not a quick thing. And probably you're going to have to use it over a p2 trips to start to understand maybe trends and it's not going to be the easiest thing. Then you've got things like your chronosite question is, which we've covered already. So you throw in all of that into the mix and it's kind of like where we could do all this and we just might not get like the level of information we need. It's yeah, it's time demanding, difficult to get by and and of course it's still only the subjective side of the coin. So we're not necessarily moving the needle to the discrepancy between that and maybe objectively what's going on under the hood here. So it's it's for those very reasons. I think that's why we struggle to see teams regularly applying sort of practice in this area. I guess at the end of the day as well there's nothing you can really do in the terms of like the schedule. You can't you can't turn around to the league and say hold on we think we're going to pick up jet lag here. Come here and can we play a different day or different time zone like there's to that extent you like you can only assume they're going to be exposed to jet lag. There's enough you know you can't like take that away from them. I know you can probably change the day you fly out potentially ahead of certain competition. So sort of logistical considerations that you might be able to go over the line. I guess what in terms of like things that are more accessible, low hanging through what are some sort of strategies that you deploy to to help with jet lag. So if you think about what the available options are for coaches, athletes, etc. You've got utilising experts consultants in the field bringing them in in some capacity. That's definitely an option and quite often the route people go. The problem can often be with that is similar to the questionnaires etc. You need good buying and if you're not going to be able to give that to the respected person, it can it can often be a bit of a fallacy that they can make a meaningful difference. Most of what we that the evidence would suggest the peer reviewed work in this area would suggest is looking at lifestyle changes. So things like managing your light exposure, your sleep, making sort of changes to eating schedules and things that will facilitate the shift. If you need it because it's important to recognise as well, there is a lot of supportive evidence around the importance of sleep regularity for sort of health benefits and sort of to reduce risks in sort of all cause mortality. That's a really strong emerging area right now and I think we shouldn't be looking to try and shift all the time just from a performance perspective. There's also that side of the coin. But in terms of other sort of tools, there's things like apps, websites and kind of today they've been quite good in terms of they give some guidance but it will be quite generic one size fits all. Doesn't really accommodate sort of those scenarios that we've run through earlier. And then there's the whole pharmaceutical topic which yeah, first thing to say is I'm not an MD, definitely not medical advice but we know with a lot of them they come with complications, contraindications in the form of like the hypnotic medication, they're not going to most of the time be like actual circadian shifters. So effectively they might not queue out but you're not going to move that body clock if you need to. And there's some in the world of meltdown in there's some concerns over like quality and assurances over availability, particularly with over the counter available like stuff that you can pick up in health food stores. So there's a lot to unpack there but fundamentally there's limitations with the existing sort of solutions but I think it's still like relying on people that can translate the research the best probably to work with organizations to understand the important nuance and context for their travel. And I think most of the time what needs to really be considered is when are you actually performing in the new time zone when do you need to be at your best because formal ones are great example right we fly to places like Singapore and Las Vegas but we're not really a climatizing to the Las Vegas or Singapore time zone because their night races and our time of performance is different compared to the European season when we're like typical race time is two three o'clock in the afternoon. So when you've got these things to consider I think the context is really what matters and that's what really needs to be considered as part of any advice that teams are receiving. Yeah, no really what I said and a perfect segue as well obviously you're not just a passionate believer and a side side side to just a jet lag you've got skin in the game you know yourself trying to make a difference in sport with it with phase. Tell me kind of about what phase is and how it kind of helps teams because I think this is kind of where you're taking science evidence and experience and actually trying to make a meaningful you know change to athletic performance. Yeah so this is kind of the the doctoric project that's got a bit out of hand because I was I was kind of just going through one of my studies and looking at sort of education level within different cohorts when it comes to jet lag and how people were applying certain strategies and I was no synotrends and I guess it's that classic. You pass your driving test you do all the practice you you pass the test but if you don't then own a car or have access to a car for many years you kind of lose a lot of what you learn initially and with jet lag the problem can often be it you may only travel a couple of times a year big flights and encounter it so knowing what to do consistently is very difficult and this was one of my bug bears kind of trying to help people and teams was there was almost an over alliance on on coming back to me it was it was quite difficult to sort of help teams become self-sustaining with it the other part of it was an actual moment that happened where I was working with a European sports team big team that was traveling out to LA and I was I was brought in to try and help support them and they said that we'd really like sort of some good level support and try and give us something to try and help with our our climateization and I said yeah in principle happy to help. And I then asked for, well, can I, and I perhaps understand a little bit about what the players have been doing before travel? And they were like, we don't get them for another few days and like one or two days before they travel. So, okay, well, I know question there's a tough, but can we ask maybe a couple of questions which might help identify a few things? No, we can't do that. Okay, and then it was okay. So, also, the head coach wants everyone to be doing the same thing. I was like, okay, at this point, I think you have to recognise that we're not going to be able to do a great deal. There's going to be no aspect to personalisation. And truth be told, it's not going to be much better than sort of a chat GPTF for almost to help support your given team. As much as I'd like to help, I just don't think I'm really going to be able to make a difference here. And very clear, that was not the fault of the team. Like, we've all, if we've worked in Pro Sport, we know how difficult it can be to get things like questionnaires or just any data at all from our athletes to understand what we need to be doing. So, yeah, getting line really for people that want to get something from your group, right? And I think that's where the idea for a product came from because I was realising that me as a consultant didn't really work that well beyond N of 1. It was very difficult to really help people beyond just one person at a time. And even then, it still had flaws. So, when it came to understanding what the product should be, it needed to be able to get some context about the body clock, like try and help profile. It needed to be able to provide personalised advice, nuance based on personal situations as well. So, if they're a young parent and they're having to get up early, like, they're clearly not going to be able to wake up at 9 o'clock in the morning, even if they want to to help with their jet lag and start shifting to a new time zone early, there's certain restraints that people have. And it's important that all advice considers the real world sort of application. Critically, though, it's important to upskill and educate in real time as well. So, the given product needed to be able to help with that and fundamentally, and the critical final piece is it had to have some level of control for the coaches and for them to be able to feel empowered with the strategies that they were putting in place. And that's where we landed on sort of an app or something that had to be with the person or the people that were travelling all the time, really worked best as the solution, combined with something like a web platform for the coaches. And that's fundamentally how phase was born. It was out of this desire to try and help solve that problem. And that was in 2023, the original ideas and the pattern that we submitted. And we're now in the current day where I've only just recently left my former one coaching role and I'm full-time in the business. So yeah, it's been a bit of a like this conversation, well, like me talking, it's been a bit of a tangent that's got out of hand and I've gone down a few different rabbit holes. But I'm enjoying it and it seems to be having a really positive impact so far. Yeah, and it's a powerful trodden, isn't it, where people practitioners go into a PhD and go really deep into a very specific topic and then out of that comes a solution that can help the field. I think that's a pretty well trodden PhD term product path that comes from a really good place and then has an impact because it's really, it's come from a scientifically validated approach. Absolutely. Yeah, and I would have to say that, unfortunately, the doctor in the last 12 months has definitely had to take a bit of a backseat because I was in a position where I had my full-time F1 coaching role. I was trying to really put, we had our, so we had our what's called our MVP, so our minimal viable product out in the real world working with lots of different sports teams last year. So we were sort of trying to improve the product and learning with real people at the very highest level of various different sports and something had to give. So the idea was I left the F1 coaching role at the end of 2025, go full-time with phase and now, thankfully, I've been able to sort of pick up where I left off with the doctor at 12 months ago, so we got there eventually, but it did it did mean that it had to take a bit of a backseat for a little while. When do you think the PhD will be wrapped up? Do you brave enough to say? Yeah, next year, I think one thing that I'm going to do is because it's a professional doctor, not a PhD, so it's been done very much as trying to advance our understanding in a given area in the field. And one thing I'm actually looking to do is do an extra study now with phase, so to really tie it all up nicely, help sort of bring the validation to the product, but also really make my prof-doc and my sort of start-up very much synergistic, which will help a lot with the time spent on it. And that's definitely been a good learning of mine over the last few years, is try and make your sort of various sort of professional endeavors sort of two birds, one stone as much as you cosy-tam, because the pate spinning can get a bit treacherous otherwise. Well, it's been, I wish you the like with finishing the PhD, the doctor, there's no that's no small feat. And I think by the nature of how a lot of people in sport probably listen to podcasts, I've no doubt there's, when this goes out, there'll be somebody listening to this sat on a plane thinking about jet lag, listening to you educate them on jet lag at the same time. So I think this could be quite a captive conversation as to when people listen to it, but yeah mate, that has been great to sort of learn from you today and yeah, thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. Cheers Andy.