How much sleep an athlete needs

The standard advice ‘sleep 7–9 hours’ is designed for an ordinary adult. An athlete expends more energy, more often trains twice a day, travels and is nervous before events, so their need for sleep may be higher. The editorial team gathered what official recommendations and studies among athletes say and how, in practice, to find your own norm.

What the general recommendations say

In 2015 the two largest professional organisations in the field of sleep — the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) and the Sleep Research Society (SRS) — published a consensus: for optimal health, adults should regularly sleep 7 hours or more. Sleep of less than 7 hours is associated with weight gain, diabetes, hypertension, depression, impaired immunity and reduced work capacity.

The same year the National Sleep Foundation released age ranges developed by an expert panel. For adults aged 18–64, 7–9 hours are recommended; for adolescents aged 14–17, 8–10 hours; for school-age children, 9–11 hours. For people over 65 the range is slightly narrower — 7–8 hours.

These recommendations concern the general population and do not take into account heavy physical loads. They describe a range within which most people feel and function well, but not an ‘exact’ figure for everyone.

It is also important that this refers to actual sleep, not time in bed. There is usually a difference between these figures: falling asleep, brief awakenings and morning ‘lingering’ take from a few minutes to an hour. Therefore, to sleep 8 hours, you need to spend more time in bed.

Do athletes need more sleep

The best-known argument in favour of ‘more sleep for athletes’ is the study by Mah and co-authors (2011) from Stanford. Players of the university basketball team, over 5–7 weeks, tried to spend at least 10 hours a day in bed. After this, sprint time, the accuracy of free throws and three-point shots, and self-assessment of physical and mental state all improved.

The study was small and had no control group, but it set a direction: extending sleep beyond the usual norm can improve performance in people who previously lived with chronic sleep deprivation. Subsequent works in other sports generally confirmed the benefit of sleep extension, although the magnitude of the effect varied.

The expert consensus of Walsh and co-authors (2021), published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, sums up: many elite athletes sleep less than recommended and have worse sleep-quality indicators than the non-athletic population. The authors recommend regularly assessing athletes’ sleep and regarding it as part of the training process.

Surveys of the athletes themselves (Sargent and co-authors, 2021) showed that on average they estimate their sleep need at more than 8 hours, but actually sleep noticeably less. So the gap between need and reality is a typical situation, not an exception.

So the practical benchmark for most adult athletes is at least 8 hours of actual sleep, and during periods of high loads or after competitions — closer to 9 hours and more, including daytime sleep.

Sleep debt and why we do not notice it

The classic study by Van Dongen and co-authors (2003) showed that restricting sleep to 6 hours a night for two weeks leads to the same impairment of attention and reaction as one or two nights of total sleeplessness. Meanwhile, participants subjectively rated their sleepiness as moderate and did not realise the scale of the impairment.

For an athlete this means that the feeling ‘I’m used to sleeping 6 hours and feel fine’ is unreliable. The body adapts subjectively but not functionally: reaction time, accuracy of movements and decision-making continue to suffer.

Sleep deprivation also affects injury rates. In the study by Milewski and co-authors (2014) among adolescent athletes, those who slept less than 8 hours had roughly a 1.7 times higher risk of injury than those who slept 8 hours or more. This is an association, not a proven cause-and-effect link, but it agrees well with the data on the deterioration of coordination and attention.

Sleep debt can be partly ‘repaid’ — with longer sleep at weekends or with daytime sleep. However, constant alternation of sleep deprivation with catch-up sleep disrupts circadian rhythms, so a stable schedule remains a better strategy than compensation.

How to determine your individual norm

The simplest method is the ‘holiday test’. During a rest or transition period without an early alarm, go to bed at your usual time and wake up on your own. For the first few days you will probably sleep longer because of accumulated debt, and after about a week the duration stabilises — that is your approximate natural need.

The second method is gradual extension. Over one or two weeks, go to bed 15–30 minutes earlier and track your well-being, training performance and daytime sleepiness. When further extension stops changing anything, you have found your norm.

Sleep trackers — watches, rings, bracelets — are useful for tracking trends and the schedule, but their accuracy in determining sleep stages is limited. They estimate total sleep time fairly well, but can be mistaken in the breakdown into phases. Therefore their data are worth combining with subjective sensations.

To assess sleep quality in sports practice, standardised questionnaires are also used, for example the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index or the specialised Athlete Sleep Screening Questionnaire. They help to identify athletes who need a specialist consultation.

• Record the time of going to bed and waking up for at least 2 weeks.
• Rate your well-being and sleepiness on a simple scale from 1 to 10.
• Compare with training indicators: working weights, pace, subjective difficulty.
• Draw conclusions from the trend, not from a single night.

Typical situations when sleep falls short

Early training is one of the most common causes of chronic sleep deprivation, especially in swimming, rowing and team sports. If training starts at 6:00, you need to go to bed no later than 21:30–22:00, and this often does not fit with studies, work and social life.

Evening competitions and matches are the second situation. After a late start, the level of arousal, caffeine and bright lighting make it hard to fall asleep, and the athlete goes to bed well past midnight. It is useful to plan the ‘evening after the event’ in advance: a light dinner, dimmed light, calm procedures and the possibility of sleeping longer the next morning.

Travel and a change of time zones is the third. Jet lag can disrupt sleep for several days, so before important events abroad it is worth arriving earlier and gradually shifting the schedule while still at home.

Finally, pre-event nervousness: a bad night before a competition happens to almost everyone. The good news is that one sleepless night has little effect on short maximal efforts if sleep was sufficient on the preceding days. Therefore it is important to ‘bank’ quality sleep in the week before the event.

Editorial conclusions

The general recommendations for adults are 7–9 hours of sleep; for adolescents — 8–10 hours. For most athletes a realistic minimum is about 8 hours of actual sleep, and during periods of high loads — more.

Chronic sleep deprivation is poorly felt subjectively, but reduces performance and accuracy and probably increases the risk of injury. Extending sleep in people with a deficit can noticeably improve results.

You can determine your own norm with the help of simple self-observation: the holiday test, gradual sleep extension and a well-being diary.

The editorial team also advises reading our articles on sleep and muscle growth, on the benefits of daytime sleep, and on heart rate variability as an indicator of recovery.

References

1. Watson NF, Badr MS, Belenky G, et al. Recommended amount of sleep for a healthy adult: a joint consensus statement of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and Sleep Research Society. Sleep. 2015;38(6):843–844.
2. Hirshkowitz M, Whiton K, Albert SM, et al. National Sleep Foundation's sleep time duration recommendations: methodology and results summary. Sleep Health. 2015;1(1):40–43.
3. Mah CD, Mah KE, Kezirian EJ, Dement WC. The effects of sleep extension on the athletic performance of collegiate basketball players. Sleep. 2011;34(7):943–950.
4. Walsh NP, Halson SL, Sargent C, et al. Sleep and the athlete: narrative review and 2021 expert consensus recommendations. Br J Sports Med. 2021;55(7):356–368.
5. Van Dongen HPA, Maislin G, Mullington JM, Dinges DF. The cumulative cost of additional wakefulness: dose-response effects on neurobehavioral functions and sleep physiology from chronic sleep restriction and total sleep deprivation. Sleep. 2003;26(2):117–126.
6. Milewski MD, Skaggs DL, Bishop GA, et al. Chronic lack of sleep is associated with increased sports injuries in adolescent athletes. J Pediatr Orthop. 2014;34(2):129–133.
7. Sargent C, Lastella M, Halson SL, Roach GD. How much sleep does an elite athlete need? Int J Sports Physiol Perform. 2021;16(12):1746–1757.