Most sleep advice for athletes asks them to change their lives. On episode 195 of The CVASPS Podcast, Dr. Meeta Singh talked about the two things a strength coach can actually influence this week, and how easy both are to get wrong.
Student athletes wear two hats. They carry an academic load and a competitive one, and sleep is the first thing compromised. Professional athletes have a different version of the same problem: evening games, late finishes, and a body still wired at midnight. In both cases the honest starting position is that the athlete will not get seven to nine consecutive hours every night. So the question becomes what to do about the gap.
Naps are a tool, and length is the variable
A nap is a legitimate way to make up for inadequate sleep at night. Three characteristics decide whether it helps or hurts.
Length
- 15 to 25 minutes. The power nap. You wake from light sleep, so you do not feel groggy, and it buys alertness for the next several hours.
- 30 to 35 minutes. Slightly deeper, reaching stage two, and more restorative.
- About 90 minutes. A full sleep cycle. You may wake a little groggy, but it is genuinely restorative.
- 45 to 60 minutes. The one to avoid. You wake from deep sleep and grogginess is likely.
Timing
Nap in the early afternoon, during the natural dip in alertness. Do not nap close to bedtime, because it consumes the sleep drive meant to carry you into the night. For athletes specifically, Dr. Singh does not want a nap ending within two hours of game time. Waking groggy before competition is worse than the tiredness it was meant to fix.
Planned or unplanned
A planned nap before an evening game or a drive is a decision. An unplanned nap at a desk or in front of a television is a symptom.
Two situations make napping the wrong call: when the athlete already struggles to fall or stay asleep at night, because the nap makes that worse, and when the nap runs too late in the day.
Quantity first, then quality, then timing
Dr. Singh ranks the three properties of sleep deliberately, and puts quantity ahead of quality. Her analogy is calories: if you are not eating enough to sustain life, the quality of those calories is not the first problem to solve. Get the hours up until the athlete feels refreshed in quiet, boring situations. Then work on quality, which is largely environmental, a cool dark quiet room. Then work on timing, which means aligning the sleep window with the athlete's own biological clock rather than an arbitrary lights-out.
Timing is where teams fight biology unnecessarily. Teenagers and young adults are inclined toward being night owls, which means that even given the opportunity, many are not physiologically ready to fall asleep until well after midnight. Putting a 19-year-old in bed at ten and calling it discipline usually produces an hour of lying awake, not an hour of sleep.
Caffeine is useful, and it lasts far longer than anyone plans for
Caffeine improves alertness, vigilance, mood and reaction time. Dr. Singh calls it a genuinely useful tool when used strategically, particularly with a sleep-deprived athlete. The problem is the arithmetic.
Caffeine takes about 20 to 25 minutes to take effect. Its half-life is roughly five to six hours. A player who takes caffeine before a 7:30 evening game still has half of it circulating around midnight, and a quarter of it ten to twelve hours later. Teams then wonder why athletes cannot sleep after a game.
The mechanism explains the crash. Adenosine accumulates in the brain the longer you are awake, and that accumulation is what makes you sleepy. Caffeine works by occupying the sites adenosine would otherwise bind to. It blocks the sensation of sleepiness without treating the sleepiness. Meanwhile adenosine keeps building. When the caffeine clears, all of it arrives at once.
Three further points teams miss:
- It is everywhere. Energy drinks, energy shots, pre-workout, post-workout. Athletes routinely have no idea how much they consume in a day.
- It mimics anxiety. Raised heart rate, faster breathing, muscle tremor. Those are also anxiety symptoms, which is why caffeine makes some athletes feel wound up rather than sharp.
- Tolerance builds in about two weeks. A habitual user drinking three or four cups a day gets no reaction-time benefit at all. They are drinking to avoid withdrawal.
Used deliberately, the two tools combine. A caffeinated nap works because caffeine takes 20 to 30 minutes to arrive: take it, nap, and wake to both the nap's benefit and the caffeine's. It requires careful timing, which is exactly the point.
What else is in the way
Screens delay sleep two ways. The blue-green light from backlit devices suppresses melatonin and pushes the body clock later. But the bigger effect is behavioral: these activities are distracting rather than relaxing, they are highly interactive, and nobody has ever walked away from social media feeling they spent less time than planned.
Alcohol helps people fall asleep and then fractures sleep as it is metabolized, disrupting REM repeatedly without the drinker being aware. It initially increases slow-wave sleep while suppressing growth hormone secretion. Tolerance develops to the slow-wave benefit. It does not develop to the growth hormone suppression.
The takeaway she leaves coaches with
Peak performance is an output of a well-rested brain and body. Excellence in any field requires drawing on discretionary energy, the reserve you spend on things you care about, rather than ordinary energy. An athlete who is not well rested does not have that reserve. Research is fairly consistent that people simply care less when they are short on sleep. If you want motivated players, that is where motivation comes from.
The honest limit
None of this is individual medical advice, and no athlete's sleep problem should be diagnosed from a podcast. Persistent difficulty falling or staying asleep, or excessive daytime sleepiness despite adequate time in bed, needs evaluation rather than a nap schedule.
Working with athletes who cannot sleep after games?
Team programs are built around your actual competition and travel schedule.
Source
- "Episode 195: Dr. Meeta Singh, How Can You Help Better Sleep For Your Athletes?" The CVASPS Podcast, July 23, 2019. Watch
