Nick Littlehales is the sleep expert who revolutionised how athletes use rest to perform at their best.
In an exclusive interview with Ozoon, he explained how his work has influenced stars such as Cristiano Ronaldo, and what teams in the NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB have to deal with to manage their intense travel schedules and the sleep demands of their athletes.
The sleep coach, who has worked with Premier League and Champions League clubs such as Chelsea, Manchester United and Real Madrid, as well as Formula 1 teams such as Mercedes, also gave his thoughts on the biggest myths around sleep.
His book, SLEEP, is an international best seller, and his eBook, The R90 Technique Playbook, is available on Amazon and books2read.com.
Read the interview below.
What are the biggest sleep myths that people still waste their time on? 8 hours a day? Don’t eat cheese in the evenings?
The idea of getting eight hours of nocturnal sleep in one solid block is a myth. There is no evidence that human beings naturally try to sleep in one long block. Another myth is that “snoozing is for losers,” when in reality, a nap is a valuable sleep cycle. Relying on blue-light-blocking glasses, mouth tape, and £5,000 mattresses to achieve perfect sleep is also often misguided.
Is the old wisdom that athletes should not have sex before big competitions true or another myth?
It is a myth that you should mandate players to not have sex before big competitions. It acts as a release from stress, and if a player is wired, they will find another way to release that tension anyway.
For some, it can be extremely stimulating and make them hyperactive, while for others, it’s just a catalyst to cuddle and fall asleep. I had a conversation about this with Sven-Göran Eriksson and his doctor back at Euro 2004 in Portugal. You can’t just tell players not to bring their partners or mandate no sex. You have to understand what that release actually does for them.
What does your work entail?
My entire technique regarding sleep was built around 90-minute clinical sleep cycles. Similarly, a football match used to be focused on 90 minutes but not anymore. You have to look at how to optimize a player’s energy journey through a game. The data might show that a player is wandering around or not doing much tracking back. But sometimes they need to retain that energy so that when they need to attack, burst forward, do something impactful, leap higher than a defender, or make a crucial decision, they have the reserves to do it, because a modern game could last a hundred minutes.
This optimization also dictates tactical choices, like who should take a late penalty. Two players might both be good at them, but based on their chronotype, a player who is an evening person might be spot on late at night, whereas a morning person shouldn’t go near it. It is all about the aggregation of marginal gains, those little one-percent factors. The data started to prove that these small details were important and actionable.
That’s really where you could see the impact. It was almost like the creation of “Fergie Time.” It was a performance introduction that essentially said, “We are more prepared for those final minutes than you are.” You can’t always control how much stoppage time is added but you can prepare to make the most of it, and the game is changing even more now.
We started off with 90 minutes, and now we frequently see 90 plus 30 minutes in extra time. You have to know that if there’s time left, even just an extra minute, you have the physical and mental capacity to score two goals if you need to. Just look at Manchester United playing Bayern Munich in Barcelona: that won them the Treble.
NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL teams have so much travelling to do during a regular season – how do you think people like Travis Kelce plan their sleep when you have to consider jet lag with their matches infiltrating Europe, Australia, Brazil etc?
You have to abandon the idea of an eight-hour block of sleep at night to manage these intense schedules and rely on a polyphasic approach, grabbing 90-minute cycles back-to-back whenever they can, whether that’s on the plane or during layovers.
You also need to control your sensory environments, using sleep kits, managing temperature, and blocking out light and sound to trigger sleep hormones naturally, rather than relying on things like sleeping tablets, which are no good at all.
The LA Rams have been criticised for their travel plans for the Melbourne game last when they were beaten by San Francisco, with not enough sleep and time difference acclimation an excuse and only arriving 28hrs before the game. What should they have done differently?
Arriving 28 hours before a game on the other side of the planet gives your natural circadian rhythm no chance to adapt. You need to start pre-adapting your body clock in the weeks leading up to a flight like that. You do that by artificially controlling your environment, using bright light to simulate morning and absolute darkness to simulate night in the new time zone, and shift your wake and sleep times slowly before even boarding the plane.
Will that mess up with their travel and lack of sleep affect their performances over the coming weeks?
Without a doubt. When you disrupt your circadian rhythm in such a way without a proactive recovery plan, you don’t clear the jet lag in a day. It takes time for the body clock to reset naturally. During that period, your alertness, decision-making, and physical recovery will all be compromised, and that significantly increases the risk of injuries.
How big of a problem is gaming in professional sports, and could Grand Theft Auto VI derail the season for some clubs?
You have to recognize that technology has entered our world and changed our behavior. We know that almost every player who plays for us right now, male or female, also plays video games, and they love it. So why not? It’s an amazing piece of technology. They get lost in it, it’s an engaging distraction, and it satisfies their competitive edge, but just like mindlessly scrolling YouTube or social media, you need to put your own filters and blockers in place, otherwise you’ll find yourself doing something ridiculously stupid and play for hours and hours, hurting your performance.
As a coach, you might say the best time for you to game is during the day but a player will respond by saying that all their mates are online at 1am or 2am. That’s when they need to be playing. OK, fine. If that’s the case, you need to adopt a polyphasic approach.
We have to understand that we are not going to stop them from gaming, so we need to embrace it, work around it, and manage the impact it has on the rest of their day. You need to implement pre and post-gaming routines. You can’t game intensely and then expect to immediately fall asleep. You really need 90 minutes of downtime before you game and 90 minutes to decompress afterward.
We know it’s unrealistic to expect a player to just stop after exactly two hours when they’re in the zone. You have to accept it and ask them: “Are you prepared to sacrifice your nocturnal sleep to be awake and stimulated? Is it worth it?” If they insist on it, we look at scheduling it. Maybe they game late on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. We look at the week and aim for, let’s say, 28 sleep cycles. If they don’t get any sleep cycles in on Tuesday night, that’s fine, because we compensate for it elsewhere and reset. As long as their next match is an 8pm kick-off rather than a 12 noon kick-off, they have a chance to recover.
You must have these open conversations instead of outright banning late-night gaming. If you just throw the book at them, they end up taking sleeping tablets, using snus, and taking unregulated supplements they don’t understand just so they can cope. When you help them manage their gaming, they usually start to self-regulate. They might decide to drop the Thursday night gaming session, or they’ll find friends in different time zones so they can game at 6am UK time when it is the evening in North America, rather than disrupting their own night’s sleep.
Just like with traditional athletes, I started getting in touch with a lot of esports competitors and full-time poker players as those industries became massive professional businesses. In these spaces, you have to consider chrono-behavior. If you’re a night owl, you might find the midnight hours highly creative and productive. If you’re a morning person, you’re better off doing those things earlier. However, you can counterbalance late-night activities with a polyphasic approach to recovery. Doing things at different times, as long as you know how to manage the periods before and after.
Professional poker players are similar. If they get a sniff of a good game, they will play from 10pm straight through to 6am, but you can’t simply ignore our natural circadian rhythms. As humans, we are tied to the planet’s rotation around the sun. That rhythm creates sunrise, midday, sunset, and midnight. It dictates when mammals and plants come to life and when they shut down. You’re only on this planet for about 80 years if you’re lucky, so you have to respect that process. If you choose to adopt a nocturnal schedule, you have to balance it. If you stay up all night playing poker, you have to put that recovery time in the following day while everyone else is out working, walking dogs, or having barbecues.
You also have to create the right environment for that shifted schedule. If you are going to keep gaming at 1am with your mates, don’t do it cooped up in a dark bedroom staring at a screen. That just makes it worse. Go somewhere stimulating, like a well-lit gym or a dedicated active space, to trick your body into daytime mode. Then, during the day, you need a room specifically designed to block out the outside world so you can sleep at the wrong time. It’s like choosing to be a long-haul pilot instead of a short-haul pilot, you have to adapt your environment to survive the schedule.
I was watching a program recently that summed it up perfectly: sleep has gone from something we just took for granted to a trillion-dollar industry. We’ve leapt into tracking, interventions, fake coaches, pseudoscience, orthosomnia, and “sleepmaxxing.” It’s gone completely nuts. It’s a bit like the sudden rise of artificial intelligence. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it or what it can do for us, but we need a bit of space to reset and transition sensibly rather than rushing in blindly.
New games and tech will keep coming out, players will always buy them and talk about them, and we just have to accept that as part of life.
Max Verstappen has famously pulled all-nighters playing sim racing games before a Grand Prix. How damaging could that be to him and his longevity in the sport, especially as he gets older? Is poor sleep something a younger athlete can get away with for a time?
I recently visited the Mercedes F1 team in Northampton to speak with their staff, and the environment is unbelievable. We all hear about Formula 1, but seeing 200 people in one area and 200 in another, working 24/7, is incredible. The margins they are dealing with are unfathomable, too small to even comprehend. They work in a relentless, round-the-clock environment. They have engineers back in Northampton who are wired live to the car while it’s going around the track in practice. They are manufacturing parts in between practice sessions and flying them out to wherever the team is in the world. It’s a massive, global, 24/7 operation.
You’re talking about margins of millimeters, hardly the width of a tire for a professional sprint cyclist whether or not they can defeat a rival. The night before an event like that, we wouldn’t even think about trying to force sleep. Instead, we’d watch David Attenborough films because they were great for relaxation. Or we’d watch footage of the last time he beat that opponent or broke a record, or he’d listen to recordings of his kids reading books at home.
You have to look at recovery tactics individually. You might like red, but someone else likes green. You might like Metallica on full blast because you were brought up in a city-centre apartment in Barcelona, making noise a comforting part of your life. But if someone puts you in the quiet countryside of Cheshire, the silence drives you nuts. It all comes down to personal preferences around environment and sound. Look at Max Verstappen: if he finds a specific recovery tool that keeps him sharp, he relies on it, because at that level of speed, alertness, and decision-making, a single mistake could mean flipping the car and changing the rest of his life.
Sometimes, an intervention just doesn’t have the same impact on one person as it does on another. Someone might do a particular activity for hours, and for them, it’s a perfect way to reset, stay in the moment, and remain focused without getting distracted. But for somebody else, that exact same activity might make them sweat, get anxious, stressed, angry, or annoyed. If gaming for four or five hours before a crucial event prevents you from overthinking or trying to force yourself to sleep, that’s fine. For you, it might be just as relaxing as listening to classical music. It works because it simply doesn’t negatively affect you the way it would someone else.
What have you found to be the most taxing professional sport for how disruptive it can be on sleep? How does it compare to football and footballers?
Golfers have a hard time of it, more than people realise. Their tee times shift wildly from 7am one morning to 3pm the afternoon of the day after, and you’ve got to handle the travel schedules, unfamiliar hotel rooms and the mental side of the game.
The biggest game-changer for golf was learning not to stress about the total hours slept before a round, lying there getting anxious and watching the clock. Getting up, doing something relaxing, and then returning to bed for a final 90-minute cycle can help take the pressure off.
The demands on Formula 1 drivers are relentless, and then you think about the margins involved when you’re racing those cars. At least footballers generally stay in similar time zones even for away games in Europe. Formula 1 drivers are constantly crossing time zones. It makes the job of managing the effects on their circadian rhythms even more complex.
The only way to cope is through pre-adaptation and environmental control. They might map out their 16 cycles over a rolling 24-hour period. If they are flying to Japan, they’ll begin shifting their sleep windows days in advance. Once they arrive, they will rely on a customized sleep environment, controlling the temperature, light, and sound to trick their brains into adapting, and use targeted 30 or 90-minute naps to maintain peak alertness for when they get behind the wheel.
How does a professional golfer find the balance between these varying start times and their rest period?
It entirely depends on chronotype. If you’re an “AMer”, a morning person, you will naturally thrive with a 7am tee time because their peak alertness aligns with the morning. A “PMer”, or an evening person, might struggle with that early start but will absolutely smash a 3pm tee time.
For a professional golfer like Rory McIlroy, how much would a bad night’s sleep affect him, especially around the majors?
Bad sleep habits can have a big impact. Sleep is where the brain processes anxiety and resets your emotional baseline. If a player like Rory doesn’t enter those deep, restorative sleep stages, his cortisol levels could end up off the charts. He might physically be able to hit the ball, but his anger management, focus, and ability to stay calm might be compromised.
How important is a personalized approach, even if you’re not Cristiano Ronaldo?
If you’re working with Paralympic athletes, some of whom may be blind, deaf, or missing limbs, and you quickly realize we are not all the same. You can’t simply tell someone to adopt a specific sleeping position if it doesn’t physically work for them. Similarly, with the growth of women’s football, we now have to factor in things like perimenopause and menstrual cycles. We have to treat sleep individually.
This individualized mindset leads to what I applied very early on, which is also what Cristiano Ronaldo is all about: polyphasic sleeping. Before the invention of electric lights, polyphasic sleeping was just what humans did. There is no evidence whatsoever that human beings naturally try to sleep in one long block. But then we invented electric lights and modern routines, leading to night-shift workers, multi-schedule demands, and frontline workers.
To adopt a polyphasic approach, you might sleep two or three 90-minute cycles back-to-back in any 24-hour period to access deep sleep. Then, you consider the second phase of your day, the siesta. You find a period in the afternoon where you can nap for 30 or 90 minutes. If you look at a footballer’s week, you might aim for thirty-five 90-minute cycles over seven days. Some nights, those cycles will be back-to-back. But on a Wednesday, if a player doesn’t get home until 3am after an away game and has a recovery day ahead, they won’t get those continuous back-to-back cycles.
To compensate, you look for short, distracted moments. Maybe just three or four minutes where you completely disconnect, like just looking out a window. That brief reset is really important for the brain. Then you add that afternoon recovery break. People used to say “snoozing is for losers,” but once you change your mindset, you realize it’s just a sleep cycle. Just like physical training, the more you practice allocating that space and doing nothing in it, the easier it becomes to shut off, enter a sleep state, and wake up ready to make the most of the next phase of your day. You perform much better during and after games as a result.
With a polyphasic mindset, a week could consist of thirty-five 90-minute cycles, which averages out to five cycles, or seven and a half hours, per day. Alternatively, you might find you are absolutely smashing it on just 28 cycles a week, which is four cycles (six hours) a night, rather than eight hours. If you can get four 90-minute cycles back-to-back of undisturbed, 25% restorative sleep, you’ve done it.
Because players like Ronaldo and others have adopted this, it has become normalized. I’ve received pictures from NHL coaches showing their entire team lying down at the training facility to take 20 minutes of rest before going out on the ice to smash seven bells out of each other. You could never have imagined that in the past. It all comes down to viewing sleep as a rolling 24-hour period containing sixteen 90-minute cycles. You establish a consistent anchor point, like sunrise, to start your 24 hours. Don’t worry about when you go to sleep; just think, “Tonight is a four-cycle night,” or “Tonight is a three-cycle night.” It completely removes the anxiety of not getting a full night’s sleep in one go.
Most people try to follow that rigid eight-hour rule at night, but it’s difficult depending on where you live or work. Take Erling Haaland or anyone living in the northern hemisphere, where it can be bright daylight late into the night. The modern sleep industry will tell you that you need blue-light-blocking glasses, mouth tape, sleep masks, trackers, melatonin gummies, and a £5,000 temperature-controlled mattress to get your perfect eight hours. But you can’t replicate that £5,000 setup in a hotel in Beijing, so why rely on it at home? Don’t tell a player in Reykjavik or a marathon runner in 50-degree heat in Ethiopia that they must keep their bedroom at exactly 16 degrees. A lot of this heightened awareness is just not practical or relevant.
This brings us back to elite players making intelligent choices.