The Power of the Nap
“Please don’t wake me, no don’t shake me, leave me where I am, I’m only sleeping.”
–The Beatles
Back in 2011, former NBA great and current Brooklyn Nets coach Jason Kidd was asked the secret to his longevity, as he was in his 17th season as an all-star caliber player. “A lot of naps,” he replied. It seemed like a weird answer. You’d think he would’ve mentioned his diet, his off-season workout routine, or his weightlifting regimen. But no. A lot of naps. And he wasn’t joking. Huh? Naps? Really?
Really. We all agree that a sufficient amount of sleep is essential to peak performance in any endeavor, whether we’re talking about taking an exam, piloting a plane, or sprinting over a lane of ten hurdles. But for the most part we’re referring to the amount of sleep we get at night. Most of us don’t consider how beneficial, or even necessary a quick recharge can be in the afternoon or early evening. The truth is, the benefits are numerous, and quite significant. This article will discuss the benefits of napping, offer suggestions for how to fit a nap into one’s daily routine, and provide insight into how napping can benefit hurdlers in particular.
In a 2011 article entitled, “Unleash the Power of the Nap,” blogger Brett McKay of www.artofmanliness.com writes in detail of the benefits of napping. The first benefit he lists is that napping increases alertness. According to McKay, “A NASA study found that a 40 minute nap increases alertness by 100%. Other studies have found that a 20 minute nap is more effective than either 200 mg of caffeine or a bout of exercise.”
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Without a doubt, alertness – physical and mental – is a key factor to any hurdler’s success. Any lapse in concentration can prove to be detrimental, or even disastrous. You have to react to every hurdle, you have to adjust your speed as you go, you have to stay focused on your lane regardless of what may be happening on either side of you. Hurdling is alertness. With practice and meets most often taking place in the afternoon, a pre-practice or pre-race nap can be just the thing to provide the heightened alertness needed to negotiate the barriers with a relaxed but focused frame of mind.
A second benefit of napping mentioned by McKay is that it improves one’s working memory. “This type of memory,” he says, “is involved in working on complex tasks where you have to pay attention to one thing while holding a bunch of other things in your memory.” A highly functioning working memory is an extremely important tool for a hurdler to have. A hurdler’s mind is constantly being flooded with new information throughout the process of learning to master technique and adapt the technique to fit one’s speed, power, and body type.
As a coach, I’ve often noticed that I must closely monitor the pace at which I introduce new ideas or new technical strategies. The fastest learners who make the most progress are most often those who can focus on what’s being emphasized in that particular workout without losing touch with the things they’ve already been taught. For example, if the athlete has been working on lead leg and trail leg mechanics for a while and then I introduce how the lead arm swinging across the body impedes both legs from functioning properly, I might find that when he or she fixes the arm, then one of the legs reverts back to an old bad habit. Hurdlers need to be able to conceptualize the whole picture, and the ability to do that means being able to remember without thinking. Perhaps, for a hurdler, muscle memory and working memory are the same thing. If so, then it would seem to indicate that napping helps improve muscle memory, which is huge for a hurdler.
A third benefit McKay mentions is that napping increases productivity by preventing the type of routine burnout that comes with our modern workaholic habits. To me, this means that hurdlers who take naps will be able to do more reps with less fatigue. Common sense says that if you come to practice sleepy you’re going to have a bad practice, no matter how much of a warrior you are.
In addition to improving one’s mood and one’s overall health, a final benefit of napping, according to McKay, is that it heightens one’s senses and creativity. The heightened senses part is a big deal for the hurdler, while the creativity part can be a big deal for the coach as well. Hurdling is a highly sensory activity. The eyes have to catch sight of the barriers, the ears have to hear the cadence, the feet have to feel themselves driving into the track in order to establish a rhythm. Having dull senses inhibits alertness, which can lead to hutting hurdles and running poor races.
As for creativity, I can say from firsthand experience that napping has worked wonders when it comes to coming up with ideas for workouts, new drills, etc. I would say that somewhere in the range of 90% of the dreams and epiphanies I’ve had about hurdling have occurred during naps. I don’t know the science of it, but it seems to me that, when napping, sleep is short enough that it’s easier to remember dreams, and that the line between sleeping and waking is not clearly defined.
According to McKay, as well as other experts, the length of the nap determines which benefit is emphasized. To boost stamina or increase alertness, he suggests a 20 minute power nap. To get into the creative zone, a nap of 60-90 minutes is preferable. The ideal time to nap is 1-3 in the afternoon. But later in the day is okay as long as you wake up at least three hours before bedtime.
Obviously, there are some obstacles to being able to take naps, the most common being a lack of time. The reason that coffee, Red Bull, 5-Hour energy boosts and similar pick-me-ups are so popular is precisely because people don’t have time to get their proper rest. We live in a world of overcommitted people, where people have more to do than they have to time to do it.
At the high school level where I coach, kids have school from approximately 8am-3pm, then practice from about 3:30-5:30, which pretty much swallows whole any time to take a nap. Unfortunately for the high school athlete, any time devoted to napping takes away time from something else important. Napping during lunch means having less time to eat, napping during a study hall means having less time to study. Napping after getting home from practice means having less time to do homework. But if you pack a lunch and have a 40 minute lunch period and spend the first 20 minutes napping (in your car, in the library, in an empty classroom), that still leaves 20 minutes to eat. If you eat as soon as you get home, that nap can give you the energy you need to get your homework done more efficiently.
As a coach, I’ll sometimes take a nap as soon as I get home, from about 6:30-7:30, which gives me a few hours to get things done before going to bed for good at night. Sometimes though, I’ll end up clunking out for the night. Instead of waking up in an hour I wake up in the middle of the night, bewildered and disoriented. To avoid such possibilities, McKay suggests setting an alarm so that you don’t end up napping longer than you want to.
College athletes and professional athletes probably have more potential to create a consistent nap time in their daily routine. In college I was a big napper. I relied on naps to get me through the rigors of training and taking classes. I would set up my schedule so that most of my classes were in the morning. That way I’d have time for a nap after lunch, before afternoon track practice. On most days I’d be so exhausted from practice that I’d have to take a nap afterward. Which meant two naps in one day sometimes. But keep in mind that in college it’s often easier to sleep during the day because there’s always someone making noise at night. Rare is the college student who gets a full eight hours or sleep at night.
Another problem for some people (though I’m definitely not one of them) is that it takes them a while to fall asleep. I can fall asleep at the first blink, but some people, like my wife, need a half hour or so to fall asleep, which means a quick catnap is out of the question. For such people, as well as those who simply have no time to nap, I would suggest a 15-30 minute stretching routine, yoga routine, or meditation session to help re-energize. The makers of the energy-boost beverages are getting rich off of our fatigue, as we keep buying what they sell. To me it just makes sense to find ways that are natural and cost-effective to give us the energy we need to get through the day awake and alert.
As McKay points out, napping is, in fact, in our nature. He states that “humans are among the few animals that take their sleep in one shot. The rest of the animal kingdom consists of polyphasic sleepers; they alternate sleep and wake cycles throughout a 24 hour period.” He goes on to claim that “the ideal pattern for human sleep is biphasic – a big stretch at night along with a shorter respite during the day.”
One of the biggest issues I have with our modern lifestyle is that it makes it so hard for us to live naturally. Whether we’re talking about eating healthily, getting enough exercise, getting enough sleep, etc., it’s hard to just “go with the flow” and follow nature’s internal and external patterns. In regards to napping, there’s a stigma attached to it. Lazy people take naps. Jobless people take naps. Who has time for a nap when there’s so much work to be done and money to be made?
But for an athlete, getting enough rest is as important to performance as any other factor you can name. I think that part of the guilt associated with napping has to do with knowing there are so many things you can do as an athlete to improve performance. Besides the big chunks of time on the track and in the weight room, training can be supplemented with pushups, abdominal exercises, as well as all the other things I mentioned earlier. Then, to live a well-rounded life, there are other considerations such as family time, social/leisure time, etc. Not to mention huge chunks of time in classes and/or at work. All of these activities and tasks require that you be awake. Those 100 pushups that you do daily won’t get done today if you’re napping during that time. So of course we look up on napping as the denizen of the lazy. So I would argue that you have to think of napping as part of your training, not a break from your training, if you are to realize its true importance and reap its full benefits.
Think about it. Jason Kidd lasted close to twenty years in the NBA, playing 82 regular season games per season, playing another month or two of playoff games, traveling and living out of hotel rooms nine months a year. And the first answer he gave when asked to explain his longevity was, “a lot of naps.” The message is clear: when it comes to taking a nap, if you can fit it in, get it in.
Works Cited
McKay, Brett. “Unleash the Power of the Nap.” The Art of Manliness. February 7, 2011. Website. February 4, 2014.
http://www.artofmanliness.com/2011/02/07/unleash-the-power-of-the-nap/
Storm, Hannah. “Jason Kidd talks about being a ‘fossil,’ whether he needs a ring for his career to be complete.” SportsDayDFW. June 4, 2011. Website. February 4, 2014.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sports/dallas-mavericks/headlines/20110604-jason-kidd-talks-about-being-a-fossil_whether-he-needs-a-ring-for-his-career-to-be-complete.ece
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