Hierarchical CoO nanosheets are grown on copper foils, by combining electro-deposition and self-sustained hydrothermal treatments and directly used as binder free anode electrodes of LIBs. CoO nanosheets are ∼50nm in thickness with several micrometers in width. The CoO nanosheets deposited on the copper foils were found to be single phase. The electrode delivers a capacity of ∼637mAhg−1 after 200 cycles at 0.1C and exhibits excellent rate capability, owing to the special hierarchical structure, preferable accommodation of strain, good conductivity and fast lithium ion diffusion. The capacity can be improved to ∼704mAhg−1 after carbon coating. The improved performance is investigated in detail. The results suggest that ameliorative conductivity, pseudocapacitance and the higher-oxidation-state component are responsible for the high capacity. More significantly, the strategy of CoO nanosheets fabrication not only can be extended to other substrates, such as carbon foams, carbon paper and carbon cloth, but can be applied to other materials, such as Fe3O4, NiO, etc.