Effects of 30- and 90-Minute Afternoon Nap Opportunities on Field-Test Performance in Female Collegiate Basketball Players.

Abstract

Afternoon napping is used as a recovery strategy in sport, but a scheduled nap opportunity is not equivalent to objectively verified sleep. This study compared no-nap seated wakefulness (N0), a 30-minute scheduled nap opportunity (N30), and a 90-minute scheduled nap opportunity (N90) in 18 female collegiate basketball players using a randomized, fully counterbalanced, three-period within-participant crossover design. Conditions were separated by at least 72 h and ended at 14:30, followed by a common 60 min wakefulness buffer, a standardized 15 min warm-up, and a fixed basketball field-test battery. Linear mixed-effects models included condition, period, and sequence as fixed effects, with participant as a random intercept; the nine omnibus condition tests were controlled for using the Benjamini-Hochberg false discovery rate procedure. Four of nine outcomes remained significant after false-discovery-rate correction: the modified-505 first 10 m split, combined modified-505 completion time, three-quarter-court sprint time, and 30-15 Intermittent Fitness Test final velocity. N90 differed from both N0 and N30 for these outcomes, whereas N30 did not differ from N0. The other five outcomes did not meet the false-discovery-rate threshold. Sensitivity analyses, including reanalysis of the pre-correction modified-505 data, preserved the same four-outcome pattern. Because sleep onset and duration were not objectively measured, the findings estimate the effects of assigned recovery-opportunity conditions rather than a physiological sleep-duration dose-response.