A breakdown of the substation hypothesis—and why the electromagnetic environment may be a missing variable in elite recovery.
The Mission Substation theory has officially entered the sports chat.
Depending on who you ask, it's either a legitimate environmental concern, a convenient scapegoat, or the latest addition to the internet's growing list of invisible culprits (looking at you, Mercury retrograde).
But before you form an opinion, here's something worth saying up front: it's hard to have a serious take on this story without understanding what EMF actually is.
Because this conversation isn't really about one substation.
It's about something bigger—something modern performance has been slowly waking up to: EMF isn't one thing you fix. It's an environment. Layered. Constant. Changing.
And whether the 49ers story ends up being the smoking gun or just a spotlight, it's forcing a mainstream question elite performers have been quietly exploring for years:
Can the electromagnetic environment increase the cost of recovery over time—and does that cost show up on the injury report?
Let's break down what actually matters here.
The "49ers Injury Curse"... Now With a Specific Variable?
If you're a 49ers fan, you don't need a medical degree to identify the pattern.
Every year, the roster is stacked, expectations are sky-high, and then... pop, strain, tear. The injury report expands.
The 49ers have become such a persistent injury outlier that "49ers injury curse" is basically its own subcategory of NFL content at this point.
But recently, that "curse" got a suspiciously specific suspect: the Mission Substation—an electrical substation located right next to the team's training facility in Santa Clara.
At first glance, this sounds like classic internet brain: a complicated invisible phenomenon gets blamed for something confusing, painful, and hard to explain. (You know, like gluten, or your ex.)
But here's the reason it hasn't disappeared after one news cycle: the question itself is not unscientific.
The biology behind extremely low frequency electromagnetic fields (ELF-EMFs) has been studied for decades. So when an injury outlier happens to train beside major electrical infrastructure? You don't have to be conspiratorial to admit the question is fair.
1) The Injury Outlier Data: Why This Wasn't Born From Paranoia
This theory didn't take off because people randomly decided to fear a substation.
It took off because the 49ers' injury record has looked statistically abnormal for years.
Researcher Peter Cowan laid this out in a detailed Substack analysis comparing the 49ers' patterns against other teams—using metrics like Adjusted Games Lost (AGL) to show how consistently the 49ers have ranked among the league's most impacted teams.
You don't have to treat Substack like peer review to understand why this matters: it gives the question structure.
"Why has this team been such a persistent injury outlier—and what environmental variables might be unique?"
2) The 49ers Aren't Laughing It Off—Which Tells You Everything
When asked publicly about the substation theory, 49ers GM John Lynch didn't respond the way most executives would.
He didn't mock it. He didn't deflect.
Instead, he said:
"Because it deals with, allegedly, the health and safety of our players, I think you have to look into everything."
Translation: if there's even a small chance it's real, we have to investigate. Because in elite sports, prevention is always cheaper than rehab.
That's a remarkably sober response to what many people would love to label "a crazy internet theory."
Even Joe Rogan, who's spent years platforming conversations about performance optimization, recently brought it up on his podcast:
"There's a disproportionate amount of severe catastrophic injuries that come out of San Francisco and their training facility is right outside this power station... The stats are in and you're looking at the amount of injuries that come from this area. It's like it's not normal."
3) What ELF-EMFs Actually Are (and Why Substations Matter)
Let's separate "phone signal" talk from "power grid" talk—because they're not the same category.
An electrical substation generates Extremely Low Frequency electromagnetic fields (ELF-EMFs), primarily in the 50/60 Hz range. These fields come from the movement of electricity through high-voltage infrastructure—transformers, switchgear, distribution lines—the stuff that keeps a stadium district lit up like a Christmas tree.
This matters because ELF-EMFs are:
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Continuous (not just "on when you use a device")
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Infrastructure-based (tied to power delivery, not consumer electronics)
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Highly proximity dependent (levels can vary dramatically by location)
So if you're evaluating the substation hypothesis, the scientific question isn't "is there EMF?" (there always is).
It's: What type, what frequency, what intensity, and what duration—in the places players spend the most time?
And that's where the biology conversation gets real.
4) Why Biology Cares: The Body Is a Listening System
Here's what's easy to forget in EMF conversations: the body doesn't just react to its environment. It actively listens.
Long before symptoms appear, long before performance drops or sleep degrades, the body is sensing, interpreting, and adapting in real time. That's what biology does.
Your body isn't just muscle and bone. It's electric.
Your brain communicates via electrical activity. Your heart rhythm is literally an electrical wave. Muscles contract based on electrical impulses. Every cell in your body maintains a voltage gradient across its membrane. Sodium, potassium, calcium, chloride—these aren't just nutrients. They're charge carriers. They're how information moves.
Ion channels act like electrical gates. Small changes in voltage or background noise can alter how cleanly they open and close, immediately affecting biological communication. These channels are extremely sensitive. They have to be—that sensitivity is what allows the nervous system to fire, muscles to contract, hormones to release on schedule, and the heart to maintain rhythm.
So when we ask whether an electromagnetic environment matters, we're not asking a mystical question. We're asking a mechanical one.
And the reason the modern environment can become chaotic is because it's dense and variable. You've got multiple frequencies and fields existing at once (ELF from grid infrastructure plus RF from wireless tech), constant fluctuation as devices connect and disconnect, reflective indoor spaces where signals bounce and overlap, and high-intensity infrastructure near high-use areas like stadiums and training facilities.
In other words: it's not one signal. It's a layered field environment that changes constantly.
And here's the critical part most people miss: the real physics problem isn't field strength. It's field complexity.
We now live inside dense, overlapping, time-varying electromagnetic environments. These fields don't exist in isolation. They interfere. They create constantly shifting patterns of information in the space the body occupies.
Biology doesn't experience this as a number on a meter. It experiences it as conditions.
5) The Real Question: Compensation, Not Damage
From a biological standpoint, chronic exposure matters most when it's not intense enough to cause obvious acute symptoms... but constant enough to add background stress.
This is where the EMF conversation has gone off the rails.
Most debates focus on whether a given field is "strong enough" to cause harm, or whether it correlates with extreme outcomes decades down the line. That framing assumes biology is passive until it's damaged. It isn't.
Most biological systems don't fail abruptly. They adapt, reroute, and compensate long before anything breaks.
The body spends extra energy to preserve function under degrading conditions. It compensates. It reroutes. It stabilizes. This isn't disease—it's the body working harder to maintain normal function in less-than-ideal conditions.
That's why the substation story matters for elite athletes specifically. Athletes operate close to threshold. They recover under high load, imperfect sleep, inflammation, and repeated tissue repair demands.
So the question isn't, "Can EMFs directly tear a hamstring?"
It's: Could a constantly layered electromagnetic environment force the body to spend more energy on compensation—even slightly—leaving less capacity for recovery, until that "slight" becomes a pattern?
6) Where Compensation Shows Up First
The nervous system is often the first place we can observe this. EEG doesn't diagnose disease. It shows organization. When brainwave patterns lose coherence, what we're seeing isn't injury—it's the brain working harder to coordinate itself.
Environmental variability increases → neural timing becomes less stable → networks compensate → higher coordination cost for the same task.
The felt experience? Mental fog. Difficulty sustaining focus. Feeling mentally scattered or "on edge." The brain adapts—but adaptation has a cost.
HRV tells a similar story. A shift toward sympathetic dominance isn't a failure. It's a signal that the system is allocating resources toward vigilance rather than restoration. The system still works—with less margin.
At the cellular level, when voltage gradients become harder to maintain, ion movement becomes less efficient. Signaling precision declines. Cells function—but less efficiently.
Blood behaves similarly. Research has shown that EMF exposure can influence red blood cell behavior and blood flow, potentially affecting how efficiently oxygen is delivered throughout the body.
And several mechanisms come up repeatedly in the research:
Oxidative stress (ROS): Research has consistently shown that ELF-EMF exposure can increase reactive oxygen species production in cells. A 2016 meta-analysis examining oxidative mechanisms found that low-intensity radiofrequency radiation triggers oxidative stress pathways that directly impact cellular recovery and repair processes. In sports terms, you don't just get tired. You get vulnerable.
Calcium signaling disruption: One well-documented mechanism for EMF bioeffects is the activation of voltage-gated calcium channels (VGCCs). Research by Dr. Martin Pall has demonstrated that electromagnetic fields can activate these channels, triggering downstream oxidative stress pathways. Calcium coordinates systems across time and scale. Small timing shifts create outsized effects because calcium signaling is foundational to muscle function, cellular communication, inflammation control, and tissue remodeling.
Collagen and connective tissue remodeling: This is one of the most relevant mechanisms for the injury conversation. A 2013 study published in Molecular Vision found that ELF-EMF exposure suppressed type I collagen synthesis in fibroblasts—the cells responsible for building and maintaining connective tissue. Soft tissue resilience isn't only about collagen amount—it's about collagen organization and remodeling behavior. When remodeling patterns are disrupted, tissue can become less resilient under elite load.
And elite load is the NFL's job description.
The body doesn't collapse. It compensates—until it can't do so quietly anymore.
7) What This Story Gets Right: Performance Is Environmental
If this whole substation theory does one thing well, it's this: it forces people to consider what elite performers already know.
Recovery isn't just what you do. It's what your environment demands while you do it.
Modern performance has become incredibly sophisticated at optimizing training science, nutrition, sleep protocols, HRV tracking, bodywork, sauna and cold protocols, and red light recovery tech.
But there's an important variable that's still rarely discussed in mainstream performance conversations—not because it's irrelevant, but because it's harder to see.
That's where this story gets interesting.
Modern electromagnetic environments aren't defined by one dominant signal. They're shaped by layers. Power infrastructure operates at very low frequencies. Cellular networks span wide ranges. WiFi and Bluetooth add constant connectivity. Satellites add another layer entirely. All of these fields can exist in the same physical space at the same time.
The interaction isn't primarily signal-to-signal. It's environment-to-system.
Each layer contributes structure to the space itself. Fields reflect off buildings and ground. They interact with conductive materials. They shift as devices connect, disconnect, move, and retransmit.
The result isn't one strong signal. It's variability.
And what systems experience isn't "a bad signal"—it's a background that becomes harder to anticipate, harder to stabilize inside of, and more demanding over time.
That instability is what sets the stage for interference at the system level—especially under high load, inflammation, and recovery demand.
Which means the 49ers question isn't just about one substation. It's about whether an already complex training environment is being pushed past the point where elite recovery can stay clean.
8) The Solution Isn't Blocking—It's Clarity
Here's what most people get wrong about addressing EMF exposure: blocking feels intuitive because it treats the environment as an enemy.
But blocking doesn't reduce complexity—it often redistributes it. And you can't block an environment you still need to function inside. The body doesn't want isolation. It wants coherence.
This is why most EMF meters confuse people. They measure amplitude. Power. Strength. But strength is not the primary variable biology cares about. Signal clarity is.
We intuitively understand this elsewhere. A conversation can be loud and clear or quiet and intelligible. A signal can be strong and unusable or weak and clean. Interference is the variable that matters.
Just as we curate food quality, light exposure, sleep timing, and information intake, we can curate the invisible environment the body is constantly interpreting. Not by eliminating technology, but by shaping conditions so signals resolve cleanly.
That's environmental clarity.
9) Why We're Excited This Conversation Is Getting Louder (Because It's Not New—and We've Been Helping Lead It)
Here's the part we can say plainly: this might be the loudest this conversation has ever been—but it's definitely not the first time it's been happening.
Elite performance has been moving toward environmental awareness for years. Mostly quietly—because at the highest level, athletes don't ignore variables just because they're invisible.
But at Aires, we haven't just watched that shift happen. We've been part of what's pushed it forward.
Long before the EMF conversation went mainstream (or got weird on the internet), Aires was built on the premise that the electromagnetic environment plays a real role in recovery capacity, nervous system regulation, and performance output—especially for people living under high load.
And we didn't come to that conclusion through speculation. We came to it through decades of development, testing, and real-world observation.
Aires doesn't intervene in biology. It doesn't stimulate or suppress the body. It works at the level of the environment—specifically the invisible electromagnetic environment—reducing interference and improving signal organization.
When environmental signaling improves, the body doesn't become something new. It becomes more efficient at being itself. Systems spend less energy stabilizing and more energy restoring. Sleep deepens not because it's forced, but because it's allowed. Focus sharpens not because it's stimulated, but because it's no longer fragmented. Recovery improves not because effort increases, but because drag decreases.
We've done live demonstrations and physiological testing with peak performers including UFC fighter Maycee Barber, Tim Welch (coach of UFC champion Sean O'Malley), and RJ Barrett (Canada Basketball / NBA). Using tools like EEG brain activity and HRV measurement, we've been able to observe real-time physiological response as electromagnetic conditions change.
We've even performed live demonstrations inside the UFC Performance Institute (UFC PI)—the UFC's world-class training, recovery, and sports science facility built to support elite athletes at the highest level.
And UFC PI leadership has spoken directly to what they observed. Dr. Duncan French, Senior Vice President of the UFC Performance Institute, said:
"When I first saw how Aires Tech mitigates the negative effects of EMF on human brain activity, I was blown-away... seeing EEG recordings of brain waves and how Aires Tech can restore optimal brain function, I was convinced of its health benefits."
That kind of statement doesn't come from internet speculation. It comes from a performance world where recovery is treated like a science—and where the signal environment is increasingly understood as part of the equation.
We've seen this conversation become real inside professional sports environments—not as an idea, but as an installation variable.
For example: the Minnesota Timberwolves' Target Center became the first Aires Certified major sports arena, integrating Aires technology throughout key high-traffic zones and WiFi connection points. The logic behind that decision mirrors the logic behind this entire story: when signal density increases, the environment becomes a variable.
This is why people describe the effect not as dramatic, but as obvious. A sense of steadiness. Ease. Energy that doesn't spike and crash. A body that feels capable without being pushed.
The Real Takeaway: This Won't Be the Last Version of This Story
The Mission Substation theory might be proven wrong.
Or it might become one of those moments the performance world looks back on and says: "That was the first crack in the surface."
Because once you understand EMF correctly, you can't unsee it. It's not one thing you fix. It's not one device you fear.
It's an environment.
And in elite sports, environments matter—because they either support recovery... or they quietly demand more effort than the athlete can afford.
It's clarity—so biology can do what it's always done, without unnecessary interference.
References
Cowan, P. A. (2026). Could chronic EMF exposure from a substation be causing 49ers injuries? Substack. https://peteranthonycowan.substack.com/p/could-chronic-emf-exposure-from-a
Lynch, J. (2026). Public comments on evaluating injury issues / substation theory. ESPN report. https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/47685487/niners-look-everything-including-substation-theory
Pall, M. L. (2013). Electromagnetic fields act via activation of voltage-gated calcium channels to produce beneficial or adverse effects. Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, 17(8), 958–965. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23802593/
Wang, J., Cui, J., & Zhu, H. (2013). Suppression of type I collagen in human scleral fibroblasts treated with extremely low-frequency electromagnetic fields. Molecular Vision, 19, 885–893. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3626379/
Yakymenko, I., et al. (2016). Oxidative mechanisms of biological activity of low-intensity radiofrequency radiation. Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine, 35(2), 186–202. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26151230/