How early morning practices affect college athletes’ sleep

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How early morning practices affect college athletes' sleep

Wearable trackers showed impact on sleep time and quality

A study using more than 27,000 sleep records of collegiate athletes provides the best evidence to date that early morning team practices take a toll on healthy sleep.

Researchers at The Ohio State University used data from wearable sleep trackers to measure sleep for 359 varsity athletes over five years.

They found that when male athletes had team practices that began before 8 a.m., they averaged about 30 minutes less sleep the night before when compared to later morning workouts. Female athletes averaged about 20 minutes less sleep.

Findings also showed evidence that the sleep was less efficient and that athletes took longer to fall asleep on nights before early practices.

"The strength of our study is that we have objective data on a large sample of athletes showing the impact of early practices on sleep," said Emaly Vatne, lead author of the study and a PhD student in kinesiology at The Ohio State University.

Most other related studies included fewer athletes and relied on self-reported sleep times, said Vatne, who is an assistant sports scientist at Ohio State's Human Performance Collaborative.

The study was published recently in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research.

The findings can offer guidance to coaches as they schedule practices for their teams, said co-author Joshua Hagen, faculty director of the Human Performance Collaborative and a research associate professor in integrated systems engineering.

"Coaches and others may have this intuition that early practices are not optimal for sleep, but now we have the data to quantify that," Hagen said.

"There may be times when it is necessary to schedule early practices, but coaches should understand the trade-offs."

The study, done in cooperation with Ohio State's Department of Athletics, involved 359 athletes from 15 varsity teams, including football and men's and women's basketball, ice hockey and swimming.

Athletes were provided with an Oura Ring wearable device that provided objective sleep and nighttime cardiovascular physiology data.

Researchers compared sleep data for athletes on nights before team practices in the early morning (at or before 8 a.m.), morning (8 a.m. to noon) or afternoon (noon to 4 p.m.)

Overall, the study included 27,576 nighttime sleep records collected between 2019 and 2024.

Findings showed female athletes averaged about seven hours of sleep before early morning practices, compared to about seven hours and 17 minutes when practices were later in the morning.

Male athletes averaged six hours and 20 minutes of sleep before early morning practices and six hours and 50 minutes before later morning practices.

But it wasn't just time asleep that was affected by early practices, Vatne said.

Findings showed sleep efficiency scores were worse when athletes practiced early in the morning - meaning sleep was more fragmented, with brief awakenings through the night. In addition, athletes took longer to fall asleep.

"That's something I didn't necessarily expect, but it makes sense," said Vatne, who also is an applied sport scientist at Racing Louisville FC.

"If you have an early morning wake-up coming, it's a bit harder to fall asleep thinking about having to get up early, and you may not sleep as well expecting that alarm."

Maybe not surprisingly, athletes stayed up later - slightly more than an hour - when they had practices in the afternoon rather than the early morning.

Overall, the results send a clear message to both coaches and athletes, Hagen said.

"We have so much evidence of the importance of sleep, not just for athletes but everyone," Hagen said.

"For athletes, sleep is really one of the best performance-enhancing activities you can do. If you want to get every advantage you can, one of the things you can do is go to bed early."

Vatne, who played varsity soccer for Ohio State, said she realizes that coaches may have to schedule early morning practices sometimes.

"But sometimes the extra sleep and focus on recovery may be what your athletes need most."

Other co-authors, all from Ohio State, were Matthew Vatne, Daniel Cencer, Catherine Saenz, William Kraemer, Bradley Robinson, Paul Jones, Jason Stone, Justin Merrigan and Tyler Carpenter

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