Mental exhaustion can impair exercise performance

New York, February 27:A new research has found that mental fatigue can impair a person's exercise performance. Researchers have found that mentally fatigued people reach physical exhaustion sooner than those who have a rested mind.

The novel research, conducted by British researchers, shows why it is sometimes so hard to work out.

In their study, the researchers’ team, including Samuele M. Marcora, Walter Staiano and Victoria Manning of Bangor University, Wales, the United Kingdom, discovered that participants who performed a mentally tiresome task just before exercising reached exhaustion much more sooner than they did the same exercise when mentally rested.

The researchers also found that mental exhaustion did not affect the performance of the heart or muscles, but it did affect their perceived effort.

"Our study provides experimental evidence that mental fatigue limits exercise tolerance in humans through higher perception of effort," the team said.

To reach their conclusions, the researchers asked 16 volunteers to exercise on a bike, half the time when they were mentally rested and half the time when they were mentally tired after 90 minutes of mentally fatiguing work.

While the study participants rode the stationary bicycle to exhaustion, their heart rate and other physiological measures such as cardiacdefine output, blood pressure, ventilationdefine, and blood lactate levels were tracked by the researchers.

The researchers’ team found study volunteers stopped exercising on average 15 percent earlier when they were mentally exhausted. Despite being exhausted after work did not actually affect participants’ muscles, it did make it harder for them to exercise so vigorously, the team found.

"It provides strong evidence that brain function can limit short-term endurance performance," said Dr Samuele Marcora.

The researchers believe their findings could help provide a way to study chronic fatigue syndrome.

"People with chronic fatigue report that they lack energy and experience 'brain fog', just like the mentally fatigued participants in this study, said Dr. Marcora.

"In addition, as in this study, people with chronic fatigue perceive exercise to be more difficult despite physiological responses considered normal during exercise."

The study, titled "Mental fatigue impairs physical performance in humans," will appear in the March print edition of the Journal of Applied Physiology. The American Physiological Society published the study.