Time-trial performance is not impaired in either competitive athletes or untrained individuals following a prolonged cognitive task

Abstract

It has been reported that mental fatigue decreases exercise performance during high-intensity constant-work-rate exercise (CWR) and self-paced time trials (TT) in recreationally-trained individuals. The purpose of this study was to determine whether performance is impaired following a prolonged cognitive task in individuals trained for competitive sport. Ten trained competitive athletes (ATH) and ten untrained healthy men (UNT) completed a 6-min severe-intensity CWR followed by a 6-min cycling TT immediately following cognitive tasks designed to either perturb (Stroop colour-word task and N-back task; PCT) or maintain a neutral (documentary watching; CON) mental state. UNT had a higher heart rate (75 ± 9 v. 69 ± 7 bpm; P = 0.002) and a lower positive affect PANAS score (19.9 ± 7.5 v. 24.3 ± 4.6; P = 0.036) for PCT compared to CON. ATH showed no difference in heart rate, but had a higher negative affect score for PCT compared to CON (15.1 ± 3.7 v. 12.2 ± 2.7; P = 0.029). Pulmonary O2 uptake during CWR was not different between PCT and CON for ATH or UNT. Work completed during TT was not different between PCT and CON for ATH (PCT 103 ± 12 kJ; CON 102 ± 12 kJ; P > 0.05) or UNT (PCT 75 ± 11 kJ; CON 74 ± 12 kJ; P > 0.05). Compared to CON, during PCT, UNT showed unchanged psychological stress responses, whereas ATH demonstrated increased psychological stress responses. However, regardless of this distinction, exercise performance was not affected by PCT in either competitive athletes or untrained individuals.

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.…”

Interindividual Variability in Mental Fatigue-Related Impairments in Endurance Performance: A Systematic Review and Multiple Meta-regression

“…The following intervention tasks were used to induce MF: computer/app-based cognitive tasks (i.e., Stroop [ 31 , 35 , 36 , 68 – 76 ], AX continuous performance task (AX-CPT) [ 3 , 77 , 78 ], rapid visual information processing test (RVIP) [ 67 , 79 , 80 ], TloadDback [ 81 ], stop-signal task [ 82 ] or a combination of cognitive tasks [ 32 , 33 ]), paper-based cognitive tasks (i.e., Stroop [ 29 , 83 – 86 ], an arithmetic task [ 68 ]) and smartphone use [ 87 ]. In most studies, some form of documentary movie was included as a control condition [ 3 , 29 , 33 , 36 , 69 , 70 , 77 , 78 , 82 – 84 , 87 ]. Other control tasks consisted of drawing a mandala [ 68 ], reading (emotionally neutral) magazines [ 35 , 73 , 75 , 85 , 86 ], staring at a white screen [ 32 ] or black cross [ 31 ], performing cognitive tasks that required less cognitive load [ 71 , 72 , 74 ] and rest [ 80 , 81 ].…”

“…A variety of manipulation checks were used to evaluate the presence of MF in participants. These specific checks were either subjective (i.e., mental fatigue visual analogue scale (M-VAS) [ 29 , 32 , 35 , 36 , 67 , 75 – 77 , 79 , 81 , 83 , 84 , 86 , 87 ], Likert scale [ 71 , 73 , 74 ] and Borg scale [ 82 ]), behavioural (i.e., cognitive performance on the intervention task [ 3 , 31 , 33 , 35 , 68 – 70 , 72 , 74 , 77 – 81 ] or on a different pre-post cognitive task [ 36 , 85 , 87 ]) and/or physiological (i.e., electroencephalography [ 67 , 79 , 80 ], functional near-infrared spectroscopy [ 33 ] and heart rate variability [ 69 ]).…”

The effect of self-selected music on endurance running capacity and performance in a mentally fatigued state

“…No verbal communication was available during the IST, but total responses and remaining time were displayed at the top right corner of the screen. This protocol was sufficient to elicit MF and impair endurance performance in previous research (Clark et al, 2019;Pageaux et al, 2014;Smith et al, 2016).…”