Research summary · Sleep and recovery
Asking collegiate athletes to sleep longer improved regularity, not sleep duration
Fifty collegiate athletes, including 14 women, wore sleep trackers during two baseline weeks and two weeks when they were asked to sleep ten hours nightly. The study took place in the offseason at one institution. Forty-nine athletes contributed paired total-sleep data and 46 contributed sleep-consistency data.
- Publication year
- 2026
- First published online
- Publication type
- Prospective within-participant baseline-to-intervention feasibility study
- Journal
- Sports Health
- Population / context
- American football · Football · Baseball · NCAA Division I
What the publication reports
Total sleep did not increase significantly: the publisher's results table reports approximately 7.63 hours at baseline and 7.50 during the intervention. Sleep-consistency scores improved from 60.09% to 64.42%. This demonstrates the difficulty of implementing a longer-sleep prescription in this setting, not that additional sleep has no performance value.
Limits and interpretation
There was no randomized parallel control group, the intervention lasted only two weeks and no athletic-performance benefit was tested. Sleep came from a consumer wearable, and the manufacturer funded the study. The abstract and results table differ slightly in follow-up sleep values and the consistency P value; both support unchanged duration and improved regularity.
Read the source
Consult the original record for the full author list, methods, references, funding and competing-interest disclosures.
Enhancing Sleep in NCAA Division I Athletes: A Study of Sleep Extension Feasibility
Original publication / indexed recordPMID: 42949008DOI: 10.1177/19417381261496986Full text at the sourceReader discussion
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