Four-thirty in the morning is not a time anyone loves. The men and women who come into the boathouse are mostly quiet and a little grim, and nobody talks much. We check the lineups, get the boats down, take our seats, and push off in the dark. For the first stretch of the row the only sounds are oars and breath. Then the sun comes up and someone, usually, says nothing at all, and everyone feels it.
I have done some version of this my entire life, and I enjoy the quiet before the world awakes. For years I would have told you it was exercise. This piece is about what I now think those minutes were doing, and what the research says about a few minutes of shared stillness for a team. It is written to coaches, because coaches control the clock. But I'm not writing it as a coach with a program. I'm writing it as someone who has been the athlete in the boat.
§ 1 · They are carrying more than the sport
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Look honestly at the people on your roster. By most of the measures we have, they are more loaded than the generation before them: more trained, more scheduled, more scrutinized, more anxious. Year-round training, early specialization, a phone that never stops comparing them to others, and for the student-athlete a full academic load on top of it all. Researchers who study this population describe real risk for anxiety, depression, disordered sleep, and the slow erosion called burnout, often carried quietly because sport's culture still treats asking for help as weakness.
Into that picture, a short period of stillness is not a luxury. It addresses something real, a body stuck in mobilization. And the definition is plainer than its reputation. Jon Kabat-Zinn's well-known phrasing is paying attention on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally. No belief is required, no incense, no hour on a cushion. A coach can teach the essence of it in five minutes at the end of practice.
I want to say at once that I wrote about the limits of that definition in Bare Attention, and I stand by it. What follows is the case for a modest practice, not for a cure.
§ 2 · What the team research shows
The evidence is modest in size and steady in direction, and one of the clearest results comes, fittingly, from a boat.
Researchers led by Bethany Jones studied 27 Division I women rowers. Some added an eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction course to their training and some trained as usual, with assignment partly decided by scheduling availability and not by a clean random split. The mindfulness rowers improved in psychological well-being, in sleep quality, in athletic coping skills, and in a 6,000-meter ergometer test. The improvements in coping, well-being and sleep went along with increases in each rower's mindfulness scores, a correlation that is encouraging but doesn't by itself show that more mindfulness caused more benefit. A women's Division I basketball team (Vidic and colleagues, 2017) showed lower perceived stress and better coping after a team program. Pooled across controlled trials of mindfulness training in athletes, a 2024 meta-analysis reported sizable effects on flow and on performance.
I believe in the direction and I doubt the size. These are small samples, mostly short, usually without blinding, and trials of this kind tend to publish their better results. I have learned to be wary of pooled effects that look large in a field of small studies. A fair summary is that the practice helps, probably, by a modest and uncertain amount, and that the mechanism is plausible and not proven: stillness lowers the body's accelerator, engages its brake, and settles the self-monitoring that makes skilled people choke. Nothing new is added. What lifts is the interference.
§ 3 · The losses that never reach the stat sheet
Performance is the part that gets measured. Alongside it runs a second ledger most programs read late: the steady drain of stress, lost sleep and burnout, which over time can wear a career down as surely as injury. Burnout isn't a character flaw. It is the predictable outcome of a load that never relents: emotional exhaustion, a creeping distance from a sport once loved, a sense of diminished accomplishment no result can fix.
There is encouraging evidence at that end. In injured athletes returning to sport, mindfulness training was associated with lower competitive anxiety and burnout. Sleep deserves its own line. Athletes are chronically under-slept, and sleep is where adaptation to training happens. The rowing study found it improved.
Not every trial succeeds. A 2025 pilot with student-athletes found no gain in global quality of life from a body-scan exercise compared with relaxation. How the practice is taught, and whether it is embedded in the team and not bolted on, may matter as much as the practice.
§ 4 · The gift only a team can give
Everything so far an athlete could gain alone. But a coach tends a team, and here the research points to something a solitary practice rarely reaches. When bodies grow still together, they tend to synchronize, and synchrony is raw material for cohesion.
Across studies of crowds and shared ritual, the degree to which bodies fall into step, in heartbeat, breath and movement, tracks how bonded and cooperative a group becomes afterward. I would be careful with how far that travels. Much of the synchrony work is in rituals and small experiments, not in sports teams, and the leap to therefore meditate together is a hypothesis. A pilot study of two intercollegiate women's soccer teams found that the team given mindfulness training reported higher social cohesion than the one that wasn't. The applied work has a human face: when a Division I women's soccer team and its staff went through a season of mindfulness training, players described building a shared phrase of care for each other, explicitly for cohesion, and a changed relationship with their emotions on and off the field.
The story of Phil Jackson and the Bulls is often told in this context. Jackson, a longtime meditator, brought in the teacher George Mumford, who then worked with his championship teams and later wrote The Mindful Athlete. I'd treat it as a good story about a coach who thought it mattered, not as evidence that it works. For a sport like rowing, though, none of this is metaphor. A crew is synchrony made physical, eight bodies, one stroke, one breath, and the boat runs fastest in the moment the eight stop being eight. Anyone who has rowed knows that, and has known it long before anyone studied it.
§ 5 · What it actually costs
Coaches guard practice time, and rightly. The studies above used courses. The rowing program ran eight weeks, the soccer program six weeks of twice-weekly sessions, and one controlled study (Basso and colleagues, 2019) found that about thirteen minutes a day of meditation changed attention, mood and emotional regulation within eight weeks. Five minutes after practice is a different thing, and nothing here shows it delivers what a course does. What I can offer is a reasonable experiment, with uncertain effects.
Here is the experiment I would run. At the end of most practices, offer a short, optional period of quiet, five minutes or so, eyes open or closed, with no requirement to become calm and no one asked to report what they feel. Run it for a season. Ask the athletes, anonymously and once a month, whether they would keep it. Their answer tells you whether they choose the practice, which is worth knowing. It does not tell you whether the practice improves performance, and a team's feedback can't answer that. If they would not keep it, stop. The cost is a few minutes and the discipline of coming back.
§ 6 · The human under the jersey
The science doesn't stay on the field. The soccer players reported a changed relationship with their emotions on and off the field, and so did their coaches. The academic stress and resilience gains are, by definition, life skills and not sport skills. The sleep that improves is life-wide. And a study of retired Iranian football players found improved well-being and lower anxiety and depression after a mindfulness-based program, so the benefit apparently reaches past the career.
An athlete is a whole person under the jersey, with the same fear and comparison and self-doubt as anyone, and the regulation you teach is the regulation they will use in a hard conversation, a grief, a first job, a sleepless night years from now. The most rigorous programs find this works best when stillness is woven into team culture and not delivered as an isolated mental-skills session. To make a few minutes sacred, set apart and protected and shared, is to teach someone that their inner life is worth tending. I can't prove that lesson never expires. I can say it is the one I would most like a coach to give.
§ 7 · What there is to lose
I can't say there is no meaningful risk. A few minutes of quiet is, for most people, safe and often pleasant. But research on meditation-related adverse effects, which I summarized in Bare Attention, finds that a minority of practitioners report unpleasant or even impairing effects, and that the risk is rarely studied in athletes. A coach who introduces stillness should keep it short and genuinely optional, and know where to refer an athlete who is struggling. Do not treat it as a mental health intervention. It isn't one.
That makes it a modest experiment worth offering, and worth listening carefully about. Give them a few minutes without another demand. Let a small part of each practice be protected from the noise and shared in silence. You can't command a young athlete into calm any more than you can will flow into a game. A coach can offer the quiet and leave the rest to the athlete.
Sources and further reading
Jones, B. J., Kaur, S., Miller, M. & Spencer, R. M. C. (2020). Mindfulness-based stress reduction benefits psychological well-being, sleep quality, and athletic performance in female collegiate rowers. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 572980.
Vidic, Z., Martin, M. S. & Oxhandler, R. (2017). Mindfulness intervention with a U.S. women's NCAA Division I basketball team. The Sport Psychologist, 31(2).
Baltzell, A., Caraballo, N., Chipman, K. & Hayden, L. (2014). A qualitative study of the Mindfulness Meditation Training for Sport. Journal of Clinical Sport Psychology, 8(3).
Si, X. W., Yang, Z. K. & Feng, X. (2024). A meta-analysis of the intervention effect of mindfulness training on athletes' performance. Frontiers in Psychology.
Johles, L., Molander, P. & Lundqvist, C. (2025). The role of mindfulness in improving quality of life among student-athletes: a pilot mediation study. Frontiers in Psychology. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1479584.
Basso, J. C., McHale, A., Ende, V., Oberlin, D. J. & Suzuki, W. A. (2019). Brief, daily meditation enhances attention, memory, mood, and emotional regulation in non-experienced meditators. Behavioural Brain Research, 356.
Tang, Y. et al. (2022). Mindfulness and regulatory emotional self-efficacy of injured athletes returning to sports. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(18).
Norouzi, E. et al. (2020). Implementation of a mindfulness-based stress reduction program among retired Iranian football players. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 47.
Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever You Go, There You Are. Hyperion.
Britton, W. B. et al. (2021). Defining and measuring meditation-related adverse effects. Clinical Psychological Science, 9.
Mumford, G. (2015). The Mindful Athlete. Parallax.