Do naps help or hinder your recovery?

Read time: 6 minutes

Last week I did something I very rarely do.

I had a nap.

Friday afternoon, completely unintentional, and 100% amazing.

What surprised me was what my watch said afterwards. Almost all of it was restorative sleep.

Which got me thinking. Are naps actually doing anything for us, or do they just feel nice?

Naps have a bad rap, unless you're a toddler or an 85-year-old cartoon character 😂

Ask most people who naps, and you'll get two answers. Toddlers, and your granddad after Sunday lunch. There's a slight air of laziness about it. A nap feels like something you get away with rather than something you'd plan.

Now have a look at what elite athletes do with their afternoons.

A 2021 review in Nature and Science of Sleep pulled together 37 studies covering 3,489 athletes to work out what napping actually does for performance (1). Napping is common in that world, and it's often deliberate.

The reason is simple enough ⤵

Sleep is where the bulk of your recovery happens. If your job depends on recovering well, you want as much high-quality sleep as you can get, and the time you spend napping DOES COUNT towards your total for that day.

The maths nobody does

This is the part most people never think about.

Say you get 6 hours 30 minutes in bed overnight. A decent attempt, but by no means your best effort.

Then you take a 45-minute nap in the afternoon. Your total sleep for that day is now 7 hours 15 minutes.

You've gone from a poor night to a respectable day, and you've done it in the time it takes to watch half a football match.

That's the case for napping in one line. It all adds up to the same total.

What a nap actually does for you

Beyond chipping away at your sleep debt, a well-taken nap can:

• Restore your alertness and energy. The most obvious one, and the one you'll feel.
• Help consolidate learning. Sleep is when your brain files what you took in earlier.
• Support your emotional balance. Everything feels more manageable when you're not running on empty.
• Enhance physical performance. More on this in a moment.
• Improve recovery from hard training. Especially useful after a heavy session.

The research backs the headline up. A review in Progress in Brain Research found that naps reduce sleepiness and improve cognitive performance (2). But the detail underneath that is where it gets useful, because the length of your nap changes what you get out of it.

Short nap or long nap?

The same review found that brief naps of 5 to 15 minutes give you benefits almost immediately after waking, and those benefits last about 1 to 3 hours (2).

Quick in, quick out, decent afternoon.

Naps longer than 30 minutes work differently. You'll get sleep inertia first. That's the groggy, slightly dazed feeling where you're technically awake but you'd struggle to spell your own name. Push through that, and the payoff is bigger. Improved cognitive performance for a much longer period afterwards; in some cases, many hours (2).

So the practical version ⤵

• 20 to 30 minutes for a quick lift in energy and focus, with minimal grogginess.
• 60 to 90 minutes to get through a full sleep cycle, which supports memory and learning.

The awkward middle ground is roughly 30 to 60 minutes. Long enough to drop into deep sleep, not long enough to come back out of it properly, so you wake up feeling worse than when you started.

That same review also found that the early afternoon is the most favourable time of day to nap (2), which lines up neatly with the afternoon dip I wrote to you about a few weeks back.

Your body is already scheduling a drop in alertness around then, so you're swimming with the current rather than against it. You're setting yourself up for the best nap possible!

What the athlete research actually found

Right, let's quickly circle back to those 37 studies.

The reviewers landed on a fairly specific recommendation. Athletes should consider naps of 20 to 90 minutes, taken between 1 pm and 4 pm (1).

They also suggested allowing 30 minutes after waking before training or competing, to let the grogginess clear.

It's worth being straight about the results, though, because they weren't unanimous.

Of the studies looking at athletic performance, 9 found a positive effect from napping, 5 found no real impact, and 2 found a negative one.

The clearest pattern was this: the benefits were much bigger in athletes who were short on sleep than in athletes who were already well-rested (1).

Which tells you something useful about when a nap is worth taking.

• If you slept badly, a nap can fix something.
• If you slept well, it offers less.

The drawbacks, because there are some

A nap isn't free.

• Sleep inertia. Covered above. You get the length of the nap wrong, and you'll lose half an hour to feeling like a zombie.
• It can disrupt your night. Nap too late in the day, and you'll be lying there at 11pm wondering why you're wide awake.
• It costs you time. An hour asleep on a Tuesday afternoon is an hour you didn't spend doing something else. For most people with jobs and kids, that's the real barrier.

On timing, the rough rule is to avoid napping within 6 to 8 hours of bedtime.

If you're in bed at 10 pm, that means wrapping up your nap by early to mid-afternoon. Which, conveniently, is exactly when it works best anyway.

How to actually take a good nap

1. Set an alarm. The single most important one. Without it, you're gambling on which side of that awkward 30 to 60 minute window you wake up.
2. Aim for 6 to 7 hours after you woke up. For most people, that lands in the early afternoon.
3. Dark, quiet and cool. Same conditions you'd want at night.
4. Try the caffeine nap. Drink a coffee, then immediately lie down for 20 to 30 minutes. Caffeine takes about that long to kick in, so you wake up as it arrives. It sounds like nonsense, but it was tested on sleepy drivers back in the nineties, and the combination beat either one on its own (3).
5. Don't fight it if you're already tired. If you know you're going to nap, skip the coffee and just sleep.

When a nap becomes a warning sign

Right, let me push back on my own advice for a second.

Used now and then, a nap is a brilliant tool, but used several times a week, every week, it stops being a tool and starts being a symptom.

If you constantly need to lie down in the afternoon just to function, the nap is only covering something up, and it's worth asking yourself ⤵

Is your night-time sleep actually restorative?

Quantity and quality are different things.

Are you drinking caffeine too late in the day?

A 3 pm coffee can still be costing you sleep at 11 pm.

Are you eating and training in a way that supports your energy?

Chronic tiredness often has a fairly boring explanation.

A nap should be a top-up, not the foundation of your sleep strategy. So if you're relying on one, something upstream needs fixing.

So, are naps worth it?

Abso bloody lutely yes...

When you're deliberate about it!

Short and early beats long and late.

20 to 30 minutes for a lift, 60 to 90 for the full cycle.

Alarm on.

Before mid-afternoon.

And the research suggests regular nappers tend to get more out of them than people who rarely nap (2).

Like most things, there's a knack to it. For what it's worth, I love a nap and manage roughly 1 or 2 a year, although in recent weeks I've more than hit my yearly quota 😂

So if you get the chance to sneak one in this week, take it guilt-free, because it's doing you some good.

Right, I'm off to go smash an upper body workout with my new app that will be ready for you to test next week 👀

And remember, if you've ever got any questions or want some advice, all you've got to do is hit that reply button.

I'll catch you next time,

Mark ✌️

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Mark Gray

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References

1. Lastella, Michele, et al. "To Nap or Not to Nap? A Systematic Review Evaluating Napping Behavior in Athletes and the Impact on Various Measures of Athletic Performance." Nature and Science of Sleep, vol. 13, 2021, pp. 841–862.
2. Lovato, Nicole, and Leon Lack. "The Effects of Napping on Cognitive Functioning." Progress in Brain Research, vol. 185, 2010, pp. 155–166.
3. Reyner, Louise A., and James A. Horne. "Suppression of Sleepiness in Drivers: Combination of Caffeine with a Short Nap." Psychophysiology, vol. 34, no. 6, 1997, pp. 721–725.

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Disclaimer: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Any guidance related to training, nutrition, supplementation, or lifestyle is general in nature and not a substitute for personalised medical advice. Always consult with a qualified healthcare professional before making changes to your health routine.