No Sex Difference in Mental Fatigue Effect on High-Level Runners’ Aerobic Performance

Abstract

Purpose Some evidence suggests that sedentary women may be more vulnerable to cognitive task-induced mental fatigue. Mental fatigue, in turn, may worse aerobic exercise performance, presumably via increased perceived effort. However, it remains unclear whether acute mental fatigue induction increases perceived effort and worsens endurance performance in high-level professional athletes and whether such effects are influenced by sex. Methods We studied 30 athletes (15 women and 16 men) in a single-blinded, randomized, controlled and crossover protocol. In separate visits, athletes either performed a 45-min cognitive task (Stroop’s color–word conflict test) to induce mental fatigue or watched a 45-min documentary as control. Then athletes performed a time-to-exhaustion test on a treadmill. Results Perceptual measures and cognitive performance indicated that the prolonged cognitive task induced a similar mental fatigue state in women and men. Cardiorespiratory and metabolic responses to the TEE did not change with mental fatigue in both sexes. Mental fatigue increased perceived effort during the time-to-exhaustion test, anticipated attainment of maximal effort, and shortened time to exhaustion similarly in women and men (mean ± SE, −27.3 ± 20.9 s for women vs −26.7 ± 15.1 s for men; P = 0.98). Conclusions The prolonged cognitive task provoked mental fatigue, anticipated attainment of maximal perceived effort, and worsened aerobic performance in professional runners with no sex differences. Although we did not contrasted athletes with nonathletes, our results suggest that being an athlete may somehow prevent women from developing greater mental fatigue and suffering more from its underlying effects compared with men.

Mental Fatigue Might Be Not So Bad for Exercise Performance After All: A Systematic Review and Bias-Sensitive Meta-Analysis

“…The final selection of all shortlisted articles was approved by all authors. Sixty-nine full articles were assessed for eligibility and 30 of them were included in the qualitative analysis (Marcora et al, 2009;Brownsberger, Edwards, Crowther, & Cottrell, 2013;Pageaux, Marcora, & Lepers, 2013;MacMahon et al, 2014;Pageaux, Lepers, Dietz, & Marcora, 2014;Duncan, Fowler, George, Joyce, & Hankey, 2015;Martin, Thompson, Keegan, Ball, & Rattray, 2015;Azevedo et al, 2016;Badin, Smith, Conte, & Coutts, 2016;Head et al, 2016;Martin et al, 2016;Smith, Marcora, & Coutts, 2015;Smith et al, 2016;Otani et al, 2017;Van Cutsem, De Pauw, et al, 2017;Veness, Patterson, Jeffries, & Waldron, 2017;Vrijkotte et al, 2018;Clark et al, 2019;Filipas, Mottola, Tagliabue, & La Torre, 2018;Penna et al, 2018a;Penna et al, 2018b;Pires et al, 2018;Silva-Cavalcante et al, 2018;Slimani, Znazen, Bragazzi, Zguira, & Tod, 2018;Staiano, Bosio, Piazza, Romagnoli, & Invernizzi, 2018;Salam, Marcora, & Hopker, 2018;MacMahon, Hawkins, & Schücker, 2019;Lopes et al, 2020). 25 of them reported sufficient information to compute at least one effect size for performance.…”

Effects of Combined HIIT and Stroop on Strength Manifestations, Serve Speed and Accuracy in Recreational Tennis Players

“…In relation to future studies, it is also necessary to test whether this effect differs according to participants' gender [39] and the differences in the duration of these impairments because it could be necessary to implement specific recovery strategies [37]. It would be also interesting to test the effects of cognitive fatigue separately on tennis service performance.…”

Smartphone Use Among High Level Swimmers Is Associated With Mental Fatigue and Slower 100- and 200- but Not 50-Meter Freestyle Racing

“…Participants had trained an average of 5.8 ( SD = 0.5) sessions/week for an average of 42.5 km ( SD = 6.2) swum per week, and they had ∼ 8.4 years experience swimming in international and national tournaments. Although Pageaux and Lepers (2018) indicated that men and women present different responses to stress and to muscle fatigue, Lopes et al. (2020) showed no sex differences in the magnitude of decrements in aerobic performance among mentally fatigued professional runners.…”

“…In the non-mental fatigue or control conditions (i.e., the 50-CON, 100-CON, and 200-CON conditions), participants watched 30 minutes of coaching videos about Olympic Games on an 84-inch screen (smartphone free room). Studies related to mental fatigue and human performance have long used these emotionally neutral 30-minute documentaries in control conditions (Marcora et al., 2009; Moreira et al., 2018) because neither cognitive performance (Fortes et al., 2019; Lopes et al., 2020) nor underlying brain mechanisms of mental fatigue were found to be altered (Franco-Alvarenga et al., 2019).…”