If you have ever watched a soccer game late in the second half, you have probably seen it. Players still fight for the ball, but the first step looks a little slower and turns look a little wider. Could a simple daytime nap help with that?
A new open-access study in teenage soccer players found that a 45-minute early-afternoon nap made them faster on an agility drill and made hard sprint work feel less exhausting. The same nap did not clearly improve “fatigue resistance,” meaning how well they held up across repeated sprints.
Why naps show up in sports
Sleep is one of the most powerful recovery tools athletes have, and it is also one of the easiest to lose when school, training, and travel pile up. A “strategic nap” is a planned short sleep during the day meant to boost alertness and recovery without replacing nighttime sleep.
The tricky part is that performance is not one thing. Quick cuts and clean footwork may respond to extra rest, while repeated sprinting depends on many systems working together, from muscles to motivation.
How the study was run
In the experiment, Mertkan Öncü, Özgür Eken, and Monira I. Aldhahi tested 16 competitive male soccer players ages 16 to 19. The protocol was approved by the Inonu University Non-Interventional Clinical Research Ethics Committee, and the athletes came from the Yeni Malatyaspor youth teams.
Each player completed three sessions in randomized order with no nap, a 25-minute nap, and a 45-minute nap, with two days between sessions. The naps took place in a dark room kept around 72 degrees Fahrenheit, and sleep was verified using a wrist-worn Fitbit Charge 6 from Fitbit Inc.
After a full hour of quiet wake time to reduce “sleep inertia,” the groggy period right after waking up, the players did two tests. One measured agility using a 20-yard shuttle, and the other measured repeated sprint ability using a short series of all-out runs with brief rest.
Agility improved with longer naps
Agility is the ability to change direction fast while staying under control, which is central to defending, pressing, and breaking into space. In the 20-yard shuttle, players were quickest after the 45-minute nap, slower after the 25-minute nap, and slowest with no nap.
On average, their times went from about 5.4 seconds with no nap to about 5.2 seconds after a 25-minute nap, then to about 5.0 seconds after a 45-minute nap. That is roughly four-tenths of a second faster than no nap, a noticeable gap in a short drill. That steady step-down suggests the longer nap gave a bigger benefit, at least for this kind of quick, coordination-heavy movement.
Players reported lower exertion
The researchers also tracked the rating of perceived exertion, a standard scale where athletes score how hard the effort felt. It is subjective, but it matters because a workout that feels easier can change pacing, confidence, and how an athlete approaches the next session.
After the 45-minute nap, players rated the sprint session about 1.4 points lower on the 6 to 20 scale than they did with no nap. Mood scores moved in the same direction, with higher fatigue feelings lining up with higher exertion ratings and stronger “vigor” lining up with lower exertion after the longer nap.
Repeated sprints stayed stubborn
Repeated-sprint ability is basically the skill of sprinting hard again and again with short rest, like the stop-and-go bursts in soccer. In this study, the sprint test used six all-out runs of about 33 yards with only 20 seconds of rest between each one.
Overall sprint performance did not show a clear improvement with napping when all the sprints were considered together. Still, the fastest single sprint was better after the 45-minute nap than after the 25-minute nap, while fatigue built up more across the series after the longer nap compared with no nap.
Why timing might matter
The nap happened in the early afternoon, a time when many people naturally dip in alertness even if they slept the night before. That “post-lunch dip” is partly about body clocks, and partly about the day’s workload catching up with you.
A narrative review in the European Journal of Applied Physiology has argued that early-afternoon naps can be most useful when athletes also leave enough wake-up time before training to shake off sleep inertia. It also points to leaving at least an hour between waking up and hard exercise as a practical buffer.
All players in this experiment were “intermediate” chronotypes, meaning they were not strong morning types or strong night types. That helps isolate nap effects, but it also means the results may not fully match a real team where some players are obvious night owls.
What coaches and teens can take from this
A 2025 soccer study in Life linked longer naps to better agility. A 2019 paper in Frontiers in Physiology found a 45-minute nap lowered perceived exertion in a shuttle-run test compared with shorter nap options. A trial in Sleep reported that a daytime nap of under an hour helped elite rugby union athletes improve peak power and lowered how hard afternoon training felt.
For coaches, the message is simple but not magical. A longer nap looked like a real tool for agility and for “how hard it feels,” but it did not turn repeated sprints into an easy ride, and the fatigue trade-off may matter depending on the day’s goals.
For teen athletes, the practical angle is hard to miss. A nap that fits between classes and practice is cheaper than new gear, but it still needs planning, and this study was small and limited to boys from one program, with sleep tracked by a wearable device rather than full sleep-lab equipment.
The main study has been published in Scientific Reports.
