Several elite athletes swear by napping, and evidence suggests you might find benefits, too.
Lebron James sleeps up to 10 hours a night. If he doesn’t get enough, he’ll squeeze in an afternoon nap. Steph Curry is a big fan of napping, as are several other NBA and NFL players. Elite athletes and their trainers recognize the incomparable power of sleep to boost performance and aid recovery, and afternoon naps are often an integral part of pro training regimes.
You work your body hard, too. So you might figure you deserve or even need an afternoon nap. The evidence, however, is a bit shy of inconclusive.
Here’s what we know for sure: Getting high-quality, sufficient sleep at night is crucial to everything we do, from simple mental tasks to high-level physical performance. Good sleep rejuvenates muscles, joints and organs in the body and clears the brain to allow optimal concentration and decision-making.
Naps can be a helpful complement to nighttime sleep, research suggests, especially if you’re training or competing at a high level, or when you have a night of poor sleep. But the effectiveness depends on your inherent “nappability,” whether you’re able to nod off quickly and wake up refreshed—traits not everyone shares.
What the Research Says
Beyond sports, a range of small studies suggest that naps can improve our ability to think clearly and generally enhance mental performance. While the effect on athletic performance has gotten less study, there are encouraging results.
In one recent study, 14 male college soccer players were tested on their ability to scan the field quickly and make passes. After napping, they performed both activities much more quickly than when they didn’t nap.
“These results suggest that daytime napping is beneficial for soccer-related cognitive function, represented by visuospatial processing and decision-making, and particularly as a potential countermeasure to mental fatigue, the researchers concluded in March 2023 in the journal Sports Science and Medicine.
Most studies like this similarly involve only a few participants each, so they don’t prove cause and effect. Researchers turn to systematic reviews of available studies to gain broader insight.“Napping may be beneficial for a range of outcomes that benefit athletes,” including physical and cognitive performance, researchers concluded in a 2021 review of 37 studies on the topic, published in the journal Nature and Science of Sleep. But they cautioned that most of the studies were found to be of only moderate quality.
A separate 2021 review of 15 studies, published in the journal Sports Medicine, found naps can help counteract poor nighttime sleep quality and potentially enhance recovery from physical activity and improve reaction times, endurance and speed- and strength-related performance. But again, the overall quality of the studies was deemed less than convincing.
How Long Should I Nap?
The most recent review of the research, published in April 2023 in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, found 30 to 60 minutes to be the ideal duration to improve physical and mental performance among athletes, whether they’d had good or poor sleep the night before. Plan at least an hour to fully wake up before training or competing, in order to shake off the groggy feelings of what scientists call sleep inertia.
It’s not clear why some people enjoy a good nap and others wake up feeling worse than before they nodded off. One theory suggests some people naturally stay in the early stages of relatively light sleep during a nap, waking easily. Others sink into deep sleep that’s highly beneficial—at night anyway—but which is a bear to awaken from.
Elite athletes might have a greater capacity to sleep on demand, a quality known as “sleepability,” a 2021 study suggests. Researchers tested this quality in a sleep lab, comparing a handful of elite athletes to high-performing athletes to non-athletes (10 participants in each group) to see how quickly they could fall into a daytime nap once the lights were turned off. Elite athletes fell asleep significantly quicker than non-athletes, and high-performing athletes were quicker to nap, too, but with more variation among individuals.
Meanwhile, it’s anybody’s guess whether intense workouts and high-level competition make more efficient nappers, or if an innate ability to nap contributes to elite performance level, or if both of these factors and more are involved in the equation.
Cautions and Suggestions
If you’re not Lebron James or otherwise earning a living via sports, you might consider whether napping is really necessary, or even healthy, given your workout goals and other life demands, as well as your own sleep habits and health status.
If you’re often tired and sluggish in the afternoon, you may not be sleeping well at night, and that should be your first concern. Excessive napping can be counterproductive, after all, making it harder to fall asleep at night.
And over time, napping is linked to a higher risk of developing dementia, particularly longer and more frequent naps. Cause and effect has yet to be determined, however.
“I consider napping to be a good thing, but it needs to be taken in the context of the person and his or her own sleep cycles and body,” said Charlene Gamaldo, MD, medical director of Johns Hopkins Sleep Disorders Center.
If you work out a lot, sleep well at night, and still yearn for naps or feel that they’re beneficial, here are some additional suggestions to consider:
“If you need to be alert right after waking up (for example, if you’re catching a few extra minutes of sleep during your lunch break), so-called power naps of 10 to 30 minutes are recommended,” write Swedish psychologists John Axelsson and Tina Sundelin in The Conversation. “Longer naps may cause some initial drowsiness — though they keep sleepiness at bay longer. But drinking coffee directly before a nap may help you wake up without feeling drowsy while also boosting your alertness.”
Bottom line: There’s no proof that napping will work for you, and no perfect formula for each individual. You might just have to sleep on it to find out.
Robert Roy Britt is an independent journalist covering physical health and mental wellness, and the author of “Make Sleep Your Superpower: A Guide to Greater Health, Happiness & Productivity."