In a bid to bounce back from last year’s disappointing Grand Final effort, the Swans installed the pods in a bid to give players the ability to have power naps throughout the day.
According to the story on the Swans website, the club’s high performance operations manager Peter Berbakov said there would be many benefits.
“There’s been a lot of research around napping during the day and certainly one of the advantages we have is that we have players who live between Bondi and Coogee and they can duck home and catch up on some work, or a bite to eat or have a quick relax at home,” Berbarkov told SwansTV.
“If players need to catch up on sessions during the day, we’re providing them with the option to have a nap during the day which the research really supports.
“Primarily we want to make sure the players are having good evening sleeps and we don’t want to disrupt that and we focus on making sure, after expending a lot of energy, they get up to nine hours of sleep to recover so this certainly isn’t a replacement for poor sleeping habits.
“The research is showing that anything between 15 and 25 minutes during the day helps cognitive function so learning ability, sharpness in the mind, as well as helping regenerate the body and physically preparing for afternoon sessions.
The installation of the sleeping pods continues a fine AFL tradition of going to extreme lengths to find an edge.
The dominant Brisbane Lions team that won three straight premierships famously had their own hyperbaric chambers to aid recovery, while Collingwood pioneered trips to the USA for high-altitude training.
Recently Port Adelaide have taken their training to the United Arab Emirates while we all know what happened at Essendon when they looked for an edge.