Fatigue and the NBA Finals: How Players Raise Their Game When It Matters Most.

The puppet hiding behind the curtains, pulling the strings on what team wins in the NBA, is not the oft despised refs. It’s fatigue. With an 82-game season littered with back to back games and late night flights, players are not “giving their all” during each night out.

As fatigue rears its ugly head, players react slower, plant their foot on the ground a fraction of a second longer, and misjudge the touch on their shot by just a smidgen. Fatigue takes what you’re capable of doing, and dials down your powers just a touch. It might not seem like much, but those fractions of a second of slower reactions or less muscular power on your leap towards the basket, are the difference between winning and losing. The difference between being 12 for 14 from the field or 4 for 15, of having your lower legs soften the landing from your rebound attempt or from your muscles caving under pressure and risking serious injury.

And this kind of fatigue isn’t something that you “tough” your way through, or thwart with some grueling crossfit-style training. Like a marathon runner who has gone out too fast, the wall of fatigue will strike, regardless of how prepared you think you are. There’s a reason that teams see a distinct advantage in wins based on their travel schedule.

How do these guys survive?

They have a secret. Despite hearing their coaches yelling at them about being gritty and leaving it all out on the floor, despite the players themselves talking about effort in their post-game chat, the players don’t actually play to their full capacity. But, it’s not entirely their fault. Their bodies and brains won’t let them. You see, the brain is a powerful thing. If we look at how fatigue actually works, our body limits us from pushing to our max in order to protect itself. So a sprinter can never fully utilize every fast twitch fiber in his legs to propel him forward. If he did, he might run faster, but he might actually rip his leg apart.

This isn’t just theoretical. Researchers have shown that the muscles always have more. Take a person and put them through a grueling exercise, perhaps an all out 30-second bike, and the athlete will report that their quads are toast. Run an electrode to the muscle, shock it, and the muscle still functions, producing a contraction showing that the muscle itself can still fire and has more to give.

When it comes to how the brain and body handle fatigue, it’s almost as if we have an algorithm in our brain taking in all of the sensory information telling us how tired we are and comparing it to how much energy we have left to give. Think of it as our car comparing the gas left in the tank with our current rate of miles per gallon of gas used to understand how far we can drive before we run out of fuel. But there’s another piece to the puzzle, how much risk is involved, what’s the reward and level of importance.

Our brain weighs that complicated gas mileage algorithm with how important the task is. Should we pull over when the projected miles left is five, or should we push on beyond when the tank reaches zero? Because we never truly reach zero in our bodies energy reserves (that would mean catastrophic failure, so we’re prevented from getting there), we use the level of importance and the risk versus reward to determine how close to zero we can get. Is our life on the line? Is our child’s life in jeopardy? Then, we might be able to perform superhuman events and lift a car off of his body. Is it a regular season game or is it game 7 of the finals? We might get a little extra juice in the latter case. According to the latest science of fatigue, your brain essentially tries to protect you from harming yourself, and it uses the perceived risks versus the potential rewards to fix where that governor is.

How does this relate to fatigue of playing basketball? When a NBA player enters the game after having played 48 minutes the day before and having slept only a few measly hours on a plane, he feels the sensation of effort and pain to a much higher degree. Perhaps his legs ache or feel stiff. All of these signals are taken into account by his brain, and almost serve as an informant, saying “Hmm, the left calf is a bit iffy today, lets make sure it operates at 60% power instead of full power.” If we are putting more effort into the game then we normally do by the 2nd quarter, the brain recognizes it and makes an adjustment, and we’ll have less energy to give during the final minutes of the game. Like a runner pacing himself through a race, the basketball player, unknowingly, divides his effort out to make sure he doesn’t reach exhaustion before the game ends. If he miscalculates, dolling out excessive amounts of energy early, his performance will suffer once his brain commands that he has had enough.

Can we override fatigue?

In researching for my new book Peak Performance, I came across one way we can ever so slightly violate fatigue’s grasp. If the task at hand has a purpose that is beyond oneself, the body will let the reigns loose and allow athletes to run faster, lift more, or jump a tad higher. You don’t see this effect when an athlete is fueled by selfish reasons, but by something greater. There’s a reason you don’t see great athletes thanking themselves or their genes or their talent after making the winning basket or catching the crucial touchdown. Instead they thank god, their family, or their teammates.

When our reason for competing is of a high importance, when the reward is greater than the risk, our brains let the reigns loose. We can access a tad more strength, speed, and power. And if the situation absolutely calls for it–our child is trapped under a car– we can access what researchers call “hysterical strength.” The subtle difference of importance, meaning, and purpose might be enough to override the fatigue of playing for 48 straight minutes just enough to influence the game.

The stakes, risks, and importance are what makes playoff basketball so much better than the regular season. With each game that passes, the importance, and rewards, go up. Instead of seeing players constrained to 75%, we might actually get close to the old coaches adage of “leaving everything you had on the floor.” In the last quarter of the game, when fatigue is overtaking the bodies of these elite athletes, what may separate the winners from the losers is not their physical conditioning, but their why.

Steve Magness is the author of the new book Peak Performance. He is a coach to professional runners and can be found on twitter @stevemagness