Does Mental Exhaustion Lead to Physical Exhaution?
Monday June 15, 2009
A study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology found that physical endurance declined substantially after people performed a mentally fatiguing task prior to riding an exercise bike. What's interesting is that the researchers found no difference in the actual performance of the the heart or muscles. Rather, they attributed the early fatigue to increased "perceived effort" by the subjects and concluded that our perceived effort or perceived exertion may actually determine when we reach exhaustion during exercise.
Read the study abstract.
This study has pretty significant implications in the area of sports psychology. If it's true that we stop exercising because we only "perceive" or believe we are fatigued, but physically we are capable of continuing to exercise, then athletes may be able to train their perceptions of fatigue as well as their physical conditions.
What do you think? Share your comments below.
Source
Samuele M. Marcora, et al. Mental fatigue impairs physical performance in humans, The Journal of Applied Physiology, March 2009.
I definitely find that I perform better during a long run or race when I was just relaxing the day before, rather than writing or working on something that requires a lot of thinking. I don’t even like to read a book the night before a race! Watching a fun romantic comedy is my usual pre-race routine.
Bike racers, and other endurance athletes, know this: if it hurts, it can always hurt more. Might as well go there.