Inside the 49ers’ Trip to Australia and How They Defeated Jet Lag and the Rams

On Sept. 4, 49ers fullback Kyle Juszczyk took the team’s Melbourne practice field-at local rugby/soccer stadium AAMI Park-for the first time, feeling a lot better than he figured he would. After all the precautions taken, and warnings heeded, and the flight undertaken, maybe all the work the team did had defeated the jet lag he knew he’d get.

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Then, the 14-year vet actually started moving around on the grass.

“And it’s just for light exercise. And we started running. And I was like, Oh, wait a second. I don’t feel good,” he said, recounting the experience 12 days later. “It was just hard to explain. Like, cognitively, I’m like, Oh, I actually, I think this is going to be good. Then I start running around, and I’m like, Nope, my body, it’s just not all the way there. It’s still asleep or something.“

Thankfully, he and his teammates still had a full week to acclimate and, if there’s a correlation between the 49ers’ plan and their performance, it was a week well spent.

Last Thursday night (or Friday midday, Melbourne time), San Francisco capped its unprecedented week abroad with a 27–7 rout of the rival Rams. In every measurable way, the 49ers came off as the more buttoned-up operation-they rushed for 174 yards on 30 carries, Brock Purdy was sharp with a 105.6 passer rating, the defense forced a fumble and intercepted Matthew Stafford, and the team decisively won the time-of-possession battle.

It’s hard, if not impossible, to determine how much of that domination was linked to the 49ers’ handling of the unique circumstances both teams faced, versus San Francisco playing better than Los Angeles on that particular day.

But the league is going to look at all of it as a test for future trips to the other end of the world-because this was the NFL’s first, and definitely not last, regular-season trip to the Eastern Hemisphere. I’d bet they’ll be back in Melbourne and also, in time, going to other Australian cities like Sydney. Elsewhere, I’ve heard for over a year that Tokyo is also firmly on the league’s radar.

So the NFL’s going to debrief with both the 49ers and Rams on what worked and what didn’t in their plans, laid out well in advance, the same way the league office does with all of the teams that go international. Only in this case, because it’s the other side of the world, rather than just the other side of the Atlantic Ocean (or the Caribbean Sea), both teams’ moves will be examined closely so other teams can build a better mouse trap going forward.

It’s fair to say that coming out of all this, the 49ers liked theirs-spearheaded by VP of player health and performance Dustin Perry and his staff-just fine. And the team’s longest-tenured player, Juszczyk, a Niner since March 2017, was nice enough to take us through how the team set it up for the guys in the locker room.

Traveling to Australia

The first steps came upon the team’s 11 p.m. PT boarding time on Sept. 2, with the team distributing “fly kits” to the players as they went to their seats-packets with supplements such as melatonin in them, and a detailed schedule on when to take them to help reset each player’s circadian rhythm (your body’s natural 24-hour internal clock) in accordance for what lay ahead.

Then came the sleep plan. Players were told they could handle it one of two ways: stay up for four-or-so hours, and then try to sleep for 8–10 hours. Or, they could go to sleep sooner, stay asleep for about four hours, then wake up for two or three hours, then go back to sleep for another three or four hours. Juszczyk was among the guys who chose the former over the latter, staying up well after the 11:45 p.m. local time takeoff.

“We tried to stay up until it was like 4 or 5 a.m. our time,” the fullback said. “And we were all exhausted at that point, so it was pretty easy to fall asleep. And with the different things they gave us, like the melatonin, I was actually able to stay asleep for a good 9–10 hours. Then I woke up, I had like an hour left, ate breakfast, and had this circadian reset supplement with pomegranate extract in it or something.

“I took that and had a lot of caffeine.”

He needed it, too, because the next instruction, upon the 7:50 a.m. local time arrival in Melbourne (the official flight time was 15:04), was simple: no naps. And as Juszczyk said, by the time San Francisco arrived at AAMI Park later that day, he didn’t think he’d need those.

The reality? He didn’t know what was going to hit him.

His legs weren’t there for the light workout at the stadium. By 5 p.m., he was dragging.

The jet lag didn’t go away, either. Over the weekend, he, his wife, and George Kittle and his wife went out to a renowned Italian restaurant in Melbourne-the type of place where a reservation was hard to come by-and spent two and a half or three hours there for dinner. In the middle of it, Juszczyk, in his words, “started losing it.” He stood up, and told the table he had to go get some fresh air, and went outside for a minute.

“I was like, I can’t do this right now,” he said.

At which point, he became pretty grateful that the 49ers had planned the trip the way they did. There was no heavy on-field work until Sept. 7, Labor Day in the States, which would serve, for intents and purposes, as the “Wednesday” of the Niners’ work week. On the Saturday and Sunday before that, the team had light workouts at the stadium, in large part to get themselves moving around as best they could.

Juszczyk said it took “about three days” to feel like himself again, which made the 49ers’ timing-putting the first practice day three days after arrival-fortuitus for him.

‘You really had to push through it’

Once the players settled in, the schedule still wasn’t exactly like it would’ve been in the Bay Area, mostly because kickoff time wouldn’t be, either-10:30 a.m. on Friday.

So, Kyle Shanahan had the team starting its on-field work around 11 a.m. local time, while this week’s practices in Santa Clara started at 1:30 PT in preparation for Sunday’s Week 2 game against the Dolphins. That helped set the pace for the players’ sleep schedules in the days leading up to the game, with things getting easier as the week went on.

“You really had to push through it,” Juszczyk said. “And man, when 5 p.m. came around, you were freaking shot, mind and body. But you drank a few more coffees than you usually would; I usually stuck it out to like 8:30, maybe nine o’clock. And then I would get a full night’s sleep, be up by like six, and we would roll.”

That, for Juszczyk, was a little different than normal-he says he generally wakes up at around 7 a.m.-but, again, worked with the earlier kickoff.

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And it set him and his teammates up to be ready on game day.

“I was waking up naturally, sometimes at 5:30, so that early-morning kickoff was nice, because we were already getting up early; I was used to it. And it almost felt like a college game where we kicked off at 10:30 a.m. And to be done by two o’clock, I was like, Dang, that’s kind of sweet.”Kyle Jusczcyk

“I felt great, especially because we had been getting up earlier than usual,” he said. “I was waking up naturally, sometimes at 5:30, so that early-morning kickoff was nice, because we were already getting up early; I was used to it. And it almost felt like a college game where we kicked off at 10:30 a.m. And to be done by two o’clock, I was like, Dang, that’s kind of sweet.”

The win made it even sweeter-and got the players excited for the trip home.

Then someone came up with the idea of an impromptu celebration on the plane.

Since he arrived in San Francisco in 2017, Shanahan has hosted the team at his house after the final cutdown, a celebration for the guys who made the roster, a get-together referred to as the “players party.” Shanahan canceled this year’s bash because of the trip to Australia. So postgame, the players said they’d have the 2026 players party on the flight home-after everyone got some sleep.

The idea was to spend the back half of the 14-hour flight partying. It didn’t happen for the most obvious of reasons.

“You’re supposed to sleep a little bit early on, and then we would wake up for the last seven hours of the flight, and then we could all enjoy it and have a good time,” Juszczyk said. “I mean, I woke up, and there was an hour left in the flight and everybody was still sleeping. So I don’t think anybody took part in the party that we had all planned.”

But they did all engage in some time travel, having taken off at 6:20 p.m. Melbourne time on Sept. 11, and landing at 3:06 p.m. PT “earlier” that day at San Francisco International Airport.

Back to San Francisco

The Rams’ stay Down Under was much quicker than the 49ers’-some 30 hours or so-partially on the premise that it’d be easier to acclimate to American time for Week 2. But truth be told, at least for Jusczcyk, for one reason or another, coming back, while still really weird, was easier than the trip out.

Jusczcyk’s mom was waiting for him at his house when he got back Friday afternoon and, as is his custom, he settled in to get a look at the TV broadcast of the game.

“I put the game on, on Netflix, because I wanted to see how Luke Kuechly did calling the game. And whenever we win, I like to watch the TV version,” he said. “And so I’m watching it with my mom and she keeps making comments about the game ‘last night.’ And I’m like, What do you mean last night? The game was this morning. It’s such a weird thing to wrap your head around.”

Admittedly, that first night, he was a little off. He went to sleep at 9 p.m., and woke up in the middle of the night, at 1 a.m. He stayed up until 4 a.m., then fell back to sleep until about 7 a.m. And he and Kittle already had plans for their second day back, a Saturday, to try to fight off the sure-to-linger jet lag.

“George and I, we went golfing so that we could be outside, be in the sun, and be active a little bit,” he said. “And I felt like that really helped.”

And Saturday night, he slept fine, had a restful day Sunday, and then went back to work Monday, with San Francisco’s offensive players staging a light workout throwing routes on air, in addition to having some meetings to get the week started.

“Yeah, I definitely think so. If we could redo it, I would do it the way that we did it.”Kyle Jusczcyk

By then, Jusczcyk said, he was fine.

Looking back at all of it now, he says the best advice he and his teammates got was to avoid naps early in the week, and tough it out to make it to a somewhat normal bedtime to work to reset the internal clock-he also said that’s the first advice he’d give any player making the trip in the coming years.

As for how the Niners’ opponents handled it, Juszczyk said he was curious to ask some of his friends on the Rams afterward, but didn’t feel right doing that after the game went the way it did. For his part, the 10th-year 49er had nothing negative to say about how the Rams went about it.

“There are so many things that go into winning a game,” he says. “I know I felt great. And I haven’t heard anything about how they felt. I haven’t heard things afterward about whether they didn’t feel good or if they regretted their decision or if they just didn’t have their best game. But I can just say that I felt great.”

Which was enough, for Juszczyk anyway, to feel like his team’s plan worked.

“Yeah, I definitely think so,” he said. “If we could redo it, I would do it the way that we did it.”

The travel plan worked so well that Shanahan gave Perry a game ball during the postgame in the locker room in Australia. And maybe, if the 49ers keep rolling in Week 2, Perry will get another one back home on Sunday.

This article was originally published on www.si.com as Inside the 49ers’ Trip to Australia and How They Defeated Jet Lag and the Rams.

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