Basketball Star Rae Burrell Swears By This Internet Skin Care Trend

In SELF’s Sleeping With… series, we ask people from different career paths, backgrounds, and stages of life how they make sleep magic happen.
Fresh off a breakout season with the Los Angeles Sparks, WNBA guard-forward Rae Burrell has even more excitement in front of her: She’s helping launch Unrivaled, a new player-owned, three-on-three women’s basketball league bringing together some of the biggest names in hoops—and paying them the highest average salaries in women’s sports history.
When Burrell’s agent approached her with the Unrivaled proposal the night before the Sparks’s final game in Minnesota last fall, “it was really exciting news for me,” Burrell, 24, who was named to Unrivaled’s Vinyl team, tells SELF. “Getting to know other players that I haven’t really been around in the WNBA has been really fun.”
To prep for Unrivaled—which will pilot a brand-new style of three-on-three on a shorter full court—Burrell has been working with Vinyl coach Teresa Weatherspoon (a.k.a. “T-Spoon”) to sharpen her skills and adapt her style to a compressed format. So far, she’s enjoying herself. “There’s more opportunities to play in the space and show what you bring to the game,” she says. Besides, she says, it comes with an enhanced sense of “togetherness”: “Since there’s only six of us [per team], there’s not as many people to lean on, so that just makes our bonds even stronger with the few people that we do have.”
When it comes to workouts, Burrell has been lifting four days a week to maintain her muscle, emphasizing big compound exercises like squats, bench presses, bird dog rows, and pulldowns, and has also penciled in a bunch of speed drills to improve her acceleration. And naturally, she’s been needing plenty of sleep to complement all that hard work. “Sometimes your body just wants to stay up, but I try to make sure that I’m in bed and ready to go to sleep by at least 12 a.m.,” she says. Read on to find out how else the WNBA star and Unrivaled launcher winds down for bed after a long day of training—from her go-to relaxation techniques to her multistep skin care regimen.
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