Many college and professional athletes regularly carve out time for naps to boost their physical and mental performance. But you don’t have to be an Olympian or a pro basketball player to reap the rewards — and you don’t even have to actually fall asleep.
Need more convincing about why you should take time out for an afternoon siesta? Read on.
What prompts naps?
Athletes generally nap for the same reasons we all do: to catch up if they haven’t gotten enough sleep or to bank their sleep in anticipation of such a scenario.
Thanks to practice, games, and travel schedules, athletes often get less-than-ideal sleep. “Even if they’re trying to be good sleepers, they may not always have the opportunity,” explains Brendan Duffy, a clinically certified sleep health coach who works with college athletes. “Sometimes they have games on the road, sometimes flights get delayed…even if they want to be able to get the amount of sleep they should at night, they need to find a way to supplement.”
It's not just athletes who are sleep-deprived, though. A new survey of adults in the U.S. found that more than half of respondents said they don’t get enough sleep at night, affecting everything from productivity to mental health.
The benefits of naps
Naps can be an antidote to daytime sleepiness and offer an array of benefits.
A cognitive boost
In a 2021 study of karate athletes, cognitive assessments included two computer-based tasks: one that measured reaction times to on-screen prompts and another that gauged participants’ ability to mentally rotate different objects on a screen. The results showed that even after a night of just four hours of sleep, a 30-minute nap was enough to restore the athletes’ cognitive abilities to baseline (non-sleep-deprived) levels.
Even athletes who aren’t sleep-deprived benefit from a daytime snooze, however. In a 2020 study, a mix of soccer, rugby, and handball players who’d all gotten seven to nine hours of sleep were asked to nap for either 40 minutes or 90 minutes. After waking, their ability to stay focused was measured via a task that required them to read through lists of numbers and cross out specific three-digit-number combinations. The players scored higher when they napped compared to when they didn’t, and also performed
slightly better with the longer nap versus the shorter one.
All of this is in keeping with other athlete studies as well. A 2021 review of 37 previous studies reinforced that naps boosted cognitive scores regardless of whether participants were sleep-deprived and also found that longer naps generally yielded better cognitive results.
Enhanced energy and mood
The same review also found that across the board, both groups of athletes (sleep-deprived and not) reported an increase in positive mood, but the boost was even greater in the sleep-deprived participants.
Finally, athletes have also reported feeling more alert and having more energy after a nap. Both of these benefits — increased energy and elevated mood — may contribute to post-nap cognitive gains.
Physical performance
Similar to the research on cognitive performance, sleep-deprived athletes generally see the greatest post-nap physical gains. And even severely sleep-restricted athletes didn’t need to make up all of their missed sleep in order to close the performance gap. One study of weightlifters who’d gotten just three hours’ sleep found that a 60-minute nap was enough to restore their grip strength and bench-press performance to baseline levels.
The best time for a nap
Early afternoon is the most restorative time for a nap, as it helps counteract what’s known as the postprandial (post-meal) slump. Although carbohydrate-heavy lunches can certainly contribute to early afternoon drowsiness, the dip in alertness is primarily a function of circadian timing — the internal sleep-wake clock that influences when you feel sleepy and when you feel alert.
How long should a nap be?
The answer is “it depends.” The review of various athlete-nap studies found nap times that ranged from just six minutes all the way up to two hours. Generally, though, naps taken on training or competition days were about 45 minutes, while the shorter catnaps were taken on rest days.
Given that the studies included nearly 3,500 participants, numerous sports, and varying nap lengths and assessment measures, there wasn’t one single “best” duration that emerged. Instead, the authors recommended that athletes nap anywhere between 20 and 90 minutes.
That said, though, other experts recommend sticking with either 20 minutes or 90 minutes. If you take a nap for about 20 minutes, sometimes called a power nap, you’ll probably stay in a lighter stage of sleep. After about 20 minutes, however, you’ll enter a deeper stage of sleep. By contrast, a nap of 90 minutes will likely allow you to enter and exit these deeper stages and complete one full cycle of all the sleep stages. This decreases the likelihood of waking in the middle of one of these deeper stages, which can leave you feeling groggy.
While the amount of sleep inertia will vary based on nap length, it’s still a good idea to build in some “nap recovery” time afterward. (For athletes, the recommendation is to allow at least a 30-minute buffer before returning to training or competition, but that’s a good guideline for non-athletes to keep in mind, too.)
Finally, even though naps are a great way to help counteract sleepiness, an overly long nap can do such a good job of reducing sleep pressure that you don’t feel sleepy at your regular bedtime.
Keeping all of this in mind, the general advice that Dr. Chris Winter, neurologist and author of “The Rested Child,” gives to athletes is to keep naps between 20 to 30 minutes unless they’re dealing with sleep debt.
“If something interfered with your ability to sleep, forget about eight hours of sleep per night and think of it more like 56 hours per week,” he says. Winter uses the analogy of a sleep credit card: Not getting enough sleep creates a sleep debit, which can be credited back over the course of a week.
“You’ve got the next seven days to make up that deficit,” he explains, which might mean napping or going to bed early or sleeping late. From a napping standpoint, though, “when you’ve been denied sleep, 20 minutes might not be enough.”
The restorative power of rest
For those aiming for a shorter time frame, Winter counsels that falling asleep isn’t necessarily the goal. “I tell athletes all the time to take 15 minutes out of their day and just rest,” he says. “If you fall asleep, great; if you don’t, it’s still wildly effective in terms of helping people feel better.”
That’s because focusing on resting rather than falling asleep removes the performance anxiety, he explains. “If you get an individual focused on resting, they often fall asleep — they feel that as soon as they sit down and close their eyes and put their feet up, they’re successfully doing what I asked them to do.”
When it comes to resting, mindset also matters. “It’s not looking at your watch every 30 seconds,” Winter says. “It’s not, ‘I can’t fall asleep.’” Instead, it’s embracing the idea of a relaxation break, which can be deeply meditative and restorative.
If you take this approach, you might find that it's sufficient. “I think it might be difficult to figure out what the person who sleeps is getting beyond what the person who rests is,” he notes.
Prioritizing downtime
Napping can be thought of like other skills: The more you practice, the better you’ll be. In this case, the skill is sleepability, or the ability to nap on demand, and it’s one that many athletes have perfected. This may be because they’ve gotten used to having to quiet their minds in order to perform well, but it’s also likely because they’ve made naps a part of their regular routine, just as creating a routine and being consistent about bedtimes can be beneficial.
Moreover, the benefits of having a regular nap (or rest) time will grow over time: You'll not only become better at falling asleep (or dropping into a deep-rest state), but you’ll likely see greater benefits. Research shows that habitual nappers may derive greater memory and performance gains than occasional nappers do.
As Winter explains to athletes: “If you’re someone who rests every day, at the end of the season, you’ve got 162 or 170, 15-minute rest periods over that time period. There’s a cumulative positivity there.”
