49ers coach Kyle Shanahan shows performance-enhancing smelling salts aren't just for players

Football leans connected tradition, providing convenient screen for the NFL’s lenient stance connected smelling salts, ammonia crystals that players judge heighten show erstwhile inhaled.

Does the olfactory exhilaration besides heighten play-calling, amplifying one’s grasp of X’s and O’s? Kyle Shanahan seemingly believes so.

The San Francisco 49ers manager was caught by a Fox tv camera moments earlier a playoff crippled Sunday against the Philadelphia Eagles taking respective whiffs from a tiny packet earlier handing it to an assistant.

Earlier this season, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that 49ers players created a strategy to marque definite everyone has contiguous entree to smelling salts during games. General manager John Lynch and Shanahan are users, according to the story, which stated that Shanahan “isn’t opposed to the occasional whiff.”

Is the NFL OK with this? The reply is simply a qualified yes.

Ahead of the 2025 season, the league’s head, cervix and spine committee recommended that teams extremity the longtime signifier of providing smelling salts to players. The determination was prompted by a U.S. Food and Drug Administration informing astir the imaginable broadside effects of inhaling ammonia, which see lung harm and masking signs of a concussion.

Players each but panicked. George Kittle, the 49ers All-Pro choky end, jumped connected an NFL Network broadcast to proclaim that smelling salts were important to his performance.

“I’m a regular idiosyncratic of smelling salts, taking them for a boost of vigor earlier each violative drive,” helium said. “We person got to fig retired a mediate crushed here, guys. Somebody assistance maine out.”

The NFL came to his rescue, saying smelling salts — besides known arsenic ammonia inhalants, oregon AIs — were not banned. Teams could nary longer supply them, but players could bring their own. It’s a compromise that whitethorn oregon whitethorn not walk the odor test. Either way, it’s not conscionable the 49ers utilizing them.

An ESPN Magazine portion successful 2017 reported that “just a fewer minutes into the game, the Cowboys person discarded truthful galore capsules that the country successful beforehand of their seat looks similar the level of a kid’s chamber aft trick-or-treating.”

Bottom line, legions of NFL players judge AIs heighten performance. They bash truthful by irritating the linings of the chemoreceptor and lungs, triggering a reflex that increases breathing complaint and humor flow, fostering alertness.

Their effectiveness was discovered agelong earlier shot was invented. Craft brew drinkers cognize Pliny the Elder arsenic the inspiration for his namesake famed treble IPA. The noted Roman naturalist and historiographer was so an aboriginal adept successful fermentation, yet helium besides wrote astir “sal ammoniac” — yes, smelling salts — successful his encyclopedic enactment “Natural History,” published successful 79 A.D.

Their popularity dispersed done Europe until, successful Victorian tradition, they were utilized to rouse ladies aft fainting spells. Later they were utilized successful battle, with British medics supplying World War II soldiers with a whiff of the substance that doctors accidental triggers the body’s “fight-or-flight” response.

These days, the Federal Aviation Administration requires that U.S. airlines transportation smelling salts onboard successful lawsuit a aviator needs to beryllium awakened aft fainting. Blocking and tackling connected a flight, however, remains strictly forbidden.

The NFL’s middling presumption isn’t curious. Experts accidental it’s an effort to trim liability successful lawsuit of concussions oregon different aesculapian complications. But it is their changeless usage that concerns doctors.

“The usage of smelling salts successful sports is decidedly not their intended use,” Dr. Laura Boxley, a neuropsychologist astatine Ohio State’s Wexner Medical Center, told NPR. “What’s happening with immoderate athletes is they’re utilizing them with overmuch higher frequence than their intended use.”

Given the comparative information of the sidelines, Shanahan isn’t successful information of a brain-rattling concussion. Shortly aft the NFL ceased supplying AIs, helium was asked by a newsman whether helium had concerns astir their prevalence.

“I mean, I don’t,” Shanahan replied with a grin. “If idiosyncratic gives maine one, I’ll instrumentality a odor of the salt. I’m not excessively disquieted astir it. I similar to instrumentality 1 to aftermath myself up and fastener myself in.”