Do you find using social media causes mental fatigue? If yes, this could be for you... Researchers find that doing mentally taxing tasks after training could boost cyclists' performance cycling
A study by researchers across universities in the UK, Spain, Italy and Denmark which involved participation from ‘highly trained and elite’ cyclists has found that adding cognitively demanding tasks after standard physical training has been completed, also known as “Brain Endurance Training” can benefit cycling performance.
According to the researchers, mental fatigue can impair physical performance. “While traditional training for endurance athletes has focused in improving physiological fitness, sports scientists are increasingly turning to mental fatigue resilience training to make further improvements to overall performance,” they said.
In the project, the researchers carried out two separate experiments. In the first, they worked with a group of 28 male road cyclists aged between 24 and 34, accustomed to cycling around 250 km per week. The participants were divided into two groups, each with the same training regime over a six-week period. The first group was given a demanding cognitive task to perform after each physical training session, designed to cause mental fatigue and cognitive overload.
The researchers found that the post-exercise brain endurance training increased the perceived mental demand of participants in both experiments by nearly 50 per cent, compared to the control groups, showing that is effective in increasing the overall training load, while maintaining the same physical load.
“You might not necessarily see benefits with that straightaway, but if you push them if they’ve been doing lots of exercise for a number of hours, that's when you’ll see the benefits of brain endurance training. Because they're now in a fatigue state, mentally fatigued and physically fatigued. And that's what separates the elite performers from the the average performer.
He did point out another taxing activity that athletes could do after training: “A technical analysis of your ride with a coach,” said Prof Ring, laughing.
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