Today on The Ascent, what if one of the biggest factors in your athlete’s performance happens before they ever step onto the field?

Today’s Featured Story looks at the 49ers and Rams in Australia, where the two NFL teams took dramatically different approaches to sleep, travel and a 17-hour time difference. The 49ers ultimately won 27–7, but the bigger lesson isn’t that one strategy won the game. It’s that both organizations treated sleep as part of performance preparation—something youth athletes can learn from.

For Mobility Monday, we’re asking whether your athlete actually needs to become more flexible. More range isn’t automatically better. Athletic mobility means having the range your sport requires and the strength and control to use it.

In Parent Playbook, we look at why parents shouldn’t solve every problem before their athlete gets the chance. Forgotten equipment, preparation and communication can become valuable opportunities to develop accountability and independence.

Today’s Daily Edge puts mobility into practice with a simple ankle sequence athletes can use before training, followed immediately by movement that teaches them to control the range they’ve created.

And in This Week at APEX, we’re talking about where families invest in their athletes. New bats, gloves, bags and cleats can cost thousands. Great equipment has its place—but the newest gear can’t make an athlete faster, stronger or more explosive. Training can.

Today’s theme is simple:

Better sleep. Better movement. Better habits. Better training.

This week, the San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Rams traveled roughly 8,000 miles to Melbourne, Australia, to play a football game. On the surface, the challenge was obvious: prepare to play an NFL opponent on another continent. Behind the scenes, however, both organizations were trying to solve another performance problem—how do you move professional athletes across a massive time-zone change without disrupting their bodies so badly that it affects their ability to perform?

Interestingly, the two teams approached that problem very differently.

The 49ers traveled to Australia well in advance of the game, giving their players several days to acclimate to the local time zone. The Rams took almost the opposite approach. They stayed in Los Angeles longer, manipulated their schedule before traveling, and arrived in Melbourne much closer to game day. Rather than completely adjusting their players to Australian time, Los Angeles attempted to keep their internal clocks closer to the schedule they were already accustomed to at home.

This wasn’t one team taking preparation seriously while the other ignored it. Both approaches were deliberate, and sleep experts didn’t universally agree beforehand about which strategy was best. These are NFL organizations with sports scientists, physicians, athletic trainers, strength and conditioning staffs, nutritionists and significant resources devoted to finding even small performance advantages.

Then the game happened.

San Francisco won 27–7, while Los Angeles looked noticeably sluggish for stretches of the game. It would be irresponsible to say the 49ers won because of sleep or that the Rams lost because of their travel strategy. Football has far too many variables for one game to prove anything like that. But after a result like this, it is reasonable to expect teams traveling internationally in the future to study what happened in Melbourne and take a very close look at both approaches.

For parents and young athletes, however, there is a bigger lesson here than determining which NFL team’s travel itinerary was better.

If professional organizations are putting this much thought into when their athletes sleep, when they’re exposed to light and how their internal clocks are functioning, why do we still treat sleep as optional in youth sports?

We spend enormous amounts of time talking about training. Athletes need more strength. More speed. Better mechanics. More swings. More throwing reps. Another lesson. Another practice. Another workout. We meticulously schedule all of those things and then often allow sleep to become whatever time happens to remain at the end of the day.

Physiologically, that makes very little sense.

Training doesn’t make an athlete better simply because the workout happened. Training provides a stimulus that the body then has to recover from and adapt to. Strength training creates a demand that the body responds to. Sprinting challenges the neuromuscular system. Throwing and hitting practice require the brain to repeatedly coordinate complex movement patterns. Learning a new technique requires the nervous system to process information and eventually make that movement more repeatable.

Sleep is involved in that process.

Research on sleep and athletic performance has associated inadequate sleep with impaired reaction time, cognitive function, decision-making and physical performance. Sleep also plays an important role in memory consolidation, which is particularly relevant to athletes because learning a movement is not simply a muscular process. When an athlete is changing a swing, learning a new throwing pattern or improving a movement skill, the brain has to retain and consolidate what was practiced.

In other words, the workout may end when the athlete leaves the facility, but the adaptation process doesn’t.

This becomes particularly important for youth athletes because their recommended sleep requirements are substantial. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends that children ages 6–12 regularly receive 9–12 hours of sleep per 24 hours, while teenagers ages 13–18 should regularly receive 8–10 hours.

Now compare those numbers with the schedule of a typical competitive youth athlete.

They may wake up before 6:30 in the morning for school, spend most of the day in class, come home to homework, attend a team practice, go to a private lesson or performance-training session, eat dinner, shower and finally have some time to themselves. Add phones, social media, video games and increasingly demanding academic schedules, and it isn’t difficult for a teenager to find themselves going to sleep at 11:30 or midnight before waking up six hours later and doing it again.

Then we wonder why they’re tired at practice.

The instinct is often to look for another performance solution. Maybe they need better conditioning. Maybe they need to work harder. Maybe they need an energy drink before the game. Maybe they need another training session.

Sometimes the athlete may simply need more sleep.

That doesn’t mean serious athletes should train less or that every poor performance can be blamed on recovery. It means training load and recovery have to be considered together. If we continually increase the amount of work an athlete performs without giving the body enough opportunity to adapt to that work, eventually we aren’t just accumulating training—we’re accumulating fatigue.

That’s especially relevant during a competitive season. A young athlete may have team practices, games, strength training and private skill development occurring simultaneously. The answer isn’t necessarily to eliminate those things. The answer is to build a schedule intelligently enough that hard training, lighter training, competition and recovery can coexist.

Sleep should be part of that calculation.

And one good night before a tournament isn’t necessarily the solution either. Athletic development rarely works through last-minute fixes. Just as we can’t cram weeks of training into the two days before a tryout, we shouldn’t expect an athlete who has consistently slept six hours per night to completely erase that pattern by sleeping ten hours Friday night.

The better approach is much less exciting: consistency.

Schedule sleep with the same intention that you schedule training. Establish relatively consistent sleep and wake times. Pay attention to late-night practices and early-morning commitments. Recognize when the athlete’s total workload is becoming difficult to recover from. And understand that sometimes protecting an athlete’s development means deciding not to squeeze one more thing into the calendar.

That’s ultimately what makes the 49ers and Rams story so interesting. NFL teams are constantly searching for tiny advantages. They analyze movement, workload, nutrition, recovery, equipment, tactics and virtually every measurable component of performance. This week, two organizations traveled across the world and devoted considerable attention to something every athlete has access to for free.

Sleep.

We may never know how much, if at all, the teams’ different approaches contributed to what happened on the field in Melbourne. But the amount of preparation both organizations put into managing their players’ sleep tells us something important.

At the highest levels of sport, recovery isn’t viewed as the absence of training. It’s part of the performance plan.

Youth athletes should start treating it that way too.

If you’re willing to invest in lessons, equipment, club teams, camps, strength training and performance technology to help an athlete improve, protecting eight, nine or ten hours for their body and brain to recover shouldn’t be an afterthought.

Sometimes the best thing an athlete can do tonight to become better tomorrow isn’t another 100 swings, another 50 throws or another workout.

Sometimes it’s going to bed.

It’s one of the most common observations made about athletes. Hamstrings feel tight? Stretch them. Hips feel tight? Stretch them. Shoulders feel tight? Stretch them.

For decades, increasing flexibility has been treated almost automatically as a good thing. If an athlete can reach farther, bend farther or move through a greater range of motion, we tend to assume we’ve improved their movement.

But an athlete doesn’t simply need access to range of motion. They need the ability to control it.

That distinction is where flexibility and mobility begin to separate.

Flexibility generally describes the amount of range of motion available at a joint or through the surrounding tissues. Mobility is more demanding. It asks whether the athlete can actively move into a position, maintain control there and ultimately produce or absorb force from that position.

That matters because sports aren’t performed passively.

A baseball player could have tremendous passive hip range of motion, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they can control their pelvis while accelerating, rotating or changing direction. A pitcher might be capable of reaching large ranges of shoulder motion, but throwing requires much more than simply getting the arm into those positions. The athlete has to coordinate the shoulder, scapula, trunk and lower body while producing and eventually absorbing tremendous forces at high speed.

In other words, having more range isn’t automatically the same as having more usable range.

That’s also why mobility training doesn’t always need to look like sitting on the ground holding a stretch.

Sometimes an athlete does need to improve available range of motion. Other times, the better intervention may be developing strength and control through the range they already possess. A controlled split squat can challenge the hip and ankle through progressively deeper positions while the athlete still has to produce force. A lateral squat can develop usable range through the hips and adductors while requiring control. Shoulder exercises can similarly challenge an athlete to actively control positions rather than simply being moved into them.

This changes the goal.

We’re no longer trying to create the athlete who can stretch the farthest. We’re trying to create an athlete who owns the positions their sport demands.

It’s also why we measure mobility as part of our TitanForge assessments at APEX. Looking at an athlete and saying, “You’re tight,” doesn’t tell us enough. We want to know where movement is actually limited, whether meaningful differences exist from one side to the other, and how those findings fit with the athlete’s strength, stability, movement and performance data.

That information gives us something much more useful than a generic prescription to stretch more. It gives us a better idea of what actually needs to be trained.

So on this Mobility Monday, instead of asking only, “How far can my athlete stretch?” ask a better question:

Can they control the range they have?

Because athletic mobility isn’t about collecting as much range of motion as possible.

It’s about having the range your sport requires—and being strong enough to use it.

TRAIN SMARTER. PLAY HARDER.

Your athlete forgot their water bottle. Their cleats are still sitting by the front door. They don’t know what time they need to arrive at practice, their uniform isn’t clean, and there’s an email they were supposed to send their coach three days ago.

And somehow, before they ever have to deal with any of it, Mom or Dad has already fixed everything.

As parents, that instinct makes sense. We want our kids to be prepared, we don’t want them embarrassed, and sometimes it’s simply easier to solve the problem ourselves. Bringing the forgotten water bottle takes five minutes. Texting the coach takes thirty seconds. Packing the equipment bag ourselves means we know nothing will be forgotten.

That may be efficient parenting. But it isn’t always effective athlete development.

One of the overlooked benefits of youth sports is that they provide young people with a relatively safe environment to experience responsibility, mistakes and consequences. Forgetting your water bottle at practice is inconvenient, but it probably isn’t catastrophic. Forgetting your cleats might mean having an uncomfortable conversation with your coach. Failing to prepare properly for a game might mean spending the first inning realizing that preparation actually matters.

Those experiences can teach lessons that another reminder from Mom or Dad never will.

There are obviously situations where parents need to intervene. Health and safety aren’t teaching opportunities to gamble with, and younger athletes still need considerably more guidance. Transportation, finances and major decisions are still adult responsibilities. The goal isn’t to suddenly tell an eight-year-old they’re completely on their own.

The goal is to gradually transfer responsibility as the athlete becomes capable of handling it.

Maybe that starts with packing their own equipment bag. Eventually, they’re responsible for knowing when practice starts and what time they need to leave. They refill their water bottle, prepare their training snack and check their uniform the night before instead of ten minutes before departure. As they get older, they begin communicating appropriately with coaches instead of having a parent handle every conversation for them.

These responsibilities might seem insignificant compared with learning to hit a baseball, throw a football or improve a sprint time. They’re not.

An athlete who learns to prepare their own equipment is learning organization. An athlete who has to speak with a coach is developing communication skills. An athlete who forgets something and has to deal with the consequence is learning accountability. An athlete who encounters a problem without immediately looking toward a parent is learning how to solve problems independently.

Those are eventually performance skills, too.

As athletes move into high school, college and potentially beyond, coaches increasingly expect them to manage themselves. Nobody should have to remind a serious high school athlete every night to drink water, pack their equipment, get enough sleep or show up prepared. College coaches certainly aren’t going to call Mom because an athlete forgot what time training starts.

Independence doesn’t suddenly appear when an athlete turns 18. It has to be practiced.

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Today’s edge takes about two minutes.

Before practice, find a wall and perform a knee-to-wall ankle mobility drill.

Keep your heel planted, drive your knee forward over your toes toward the wall, then return.

Perform 8–10 controlled repetitions on each side.

Don’t force the range and don’t allow the heel to lift.

Why the ankle?

Dorsiflexion—the ability of the shin to move forward over the foot—contributes to positions athletes use constantly when squatting, landing, accelerating and decelerating.

Then immediately use the range you just accessed.

Perform:

5 controlled squats → 5 snap-downs → 3 accelerations.

That’s the important part.

Don’t just create range.

TODAY’S EDGE: Mobilize → Control → Move.