It’s up to St. Louis Blues general manager Doug Armstrong to ensure the team’s roster is set. It’s head coach Craig Berube’s job to ensure the lineup is in tune. And it’s Ryan Podell’s responsibility to ensure each player is fit and healthy enough to compete to the best of their ability. Consider Podell, the organization’s director of performance, one of the unsung heroes of the Blues’ success. Every day, he helps players get faster and stronger. He coordinates their meals and even advises them on sleep. Podell spoke with SLM last week, prior to the Blues’ West Coast road trip, about all of the aspects that go into working with elite athletes, including the value of a great diet.
You’ve worked with athletes from the NHL, NBA, and NFL during your career. From a training perspective, is there anything that separates them? The vast majority of the training aspects are very similar across all sports. The nuances are with the schedule. The NBA schedule is very similar to the NHL schedule, where you have 82 games—41 home and 41 away—across the country and in Canada. So you have to take into account the travel and density of games. The NFL is pretty structured, where you have one game each week and you can plan around it. With the NHL, for example, with 82 games and travel, training is more reactive, where we’re thinking, How can we best prescribe something nutritionally or from a training perspective or with a recovery modality that’s going to best help repair each and every athlete, so they can be as close to their best as can be expected come game time?
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How does the exercise regimen vary between sports? The context of the sport is what’s going to provide individual nuances. The best way to train for hockey is to play hockey. The best way to train for basketball is to play basketball. The best way to train for football is to play football. You’re not going to get any more specific or advantageous than that in the season. So we’re more of an adjunct or accessory in terms of helping them to be able to spend more time on the ice or on the field by providing them that underlying support.
What does your daily routine look like in terms of the things you do to help players spend more time on the ice? Before game day even comes, we coordinate with coaches and management about what might be the optimal schedule. Should we skate? Should we not skate? How long should we skate. What kind of practice should it be? We look at all these different things—intensities, volumes, times, structures—to help us optimize.
How does, say, the upcoming West Coast road trip affect training plans? So we’re playing Seattle in two days. We know it’s a two-hour time change. We know it’s a four-hour flight. In advance, we’re flying out two days early, so we can further adapt our circadian rhythms to Pacific time… We’ll do different things like manipulation of the schedule and meal times that can help us reset our internal body clocks.
Pregame naps are such an ingrained part of hockey culture. Are those necessary and proven to be helpful? Or are they more or less just part of long-held routines and habits? It depends. After a game, their sympathetic nervous system is so amped up, they can have a really hard time falling asleep. It’s pretty common for a player in any sport. Their adrenaline is rushing. One way they can offset that lack of sleep is to take a nap. We try to encourage them to take a nap of one of two lengths: either around 20 to 30 minutes or anything that’s in an hour-and-a-half increment.
Can you explain those intervals? A full sleep cycle is roughly 90 minutes. It’s usually about 20 to 30 minutes before you get into some of the deeper sleep where, if you wake up, you feel disoriented and foggy. So those 20 to 30 minutes are still in those REM phases. It’s pretty light sleep. When you wake up, you’re going to feel refreshed.
With all the travel, it’s probably valuable to get sleep whenever possible. If you think about it, we play four games a week. If they can get an hour-and-a-half of sleep on those four days, that’s an extra six hours of sleep for the week. Sleep is kind of like a bank. It’s an investment. With those naps, guys are going to be able to help offset some of the problems they might have falling asleep after games.
For a West Coast swing like this, how many meals will the team provide? It can depend on a few things. For instance, what are the COVID restrictions in the municipality or state? We’re going to Canada, and there are different restrictions there. Some restaurants may be open. Some might not. Typically, on a game day, we’ll provide them with breakfast, lunch, pregame snack, and postgame meal.
How much does nutrition overlap with your work? I handle a lot of nutritional aspects, whether it’s supplementation, meal planning, designing menus, or coordinating meal times on the plane and at the hotel, at Enterprise Center, and at our practice facility. I’m constantly talking to our chefs, who do an outstanding job, about finalizing menus. I let the chef be the artist, but I’ll give them parameters and guidance as far as things we want or things to avoid. Then we’ll go over a menu a couple of days or weeks in advance, so they have time to get the products… Nutrition goes hand in hand with performance. It’s the most important part of performance, because it’s ultimately what’s used to fuel your body.
That seems helpful for anyone to keep in mind, whether or not they’re an elite athlete. At the end of the day, what is the No. 1 excuse for people who can’t partake in some form of fitness? It’s usually time. Well, nutrition is probably the most important piece of the puzzle. Think of it like this: If you eat a piece of chocolate and it’s 200 calories, it’s going to take you probably 35 minutes on the treadmill to burn off those calories. If you’re saying time is the biggest constraint to being fit, you’re much better served just not eating that piece of chocolate… Of course, that’s much easier said than done, right?
