“Tire your brain and your body may follow, a remarkable new study of mental fatigue finds. Strenuous mental exertion may lessen endurance and lead to shortened workouts, even if, in strict physiological terms, your body still has plenty of energy reserves.
Scientists have long been intrigued by the idea that physical exertion affects our ability to think, with most studies finding that short bouts of exercise typically improve cognition. Prolonged and exhausting physical exercise, on the other hand, may leave practitioners too worn out to think clearly, at least for a short period of time.
But the inverse possibility — that too much thinking might impair physical performance — has received far less attention. So scientists from the University of Kent in England and the French Institute of Health and Medical Research, known as INSERM, joined forces to investigate the matter. For a study published online in May in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, they decided to tire volunteers’ brains with a mentally demanding computer word game and see how well their bodies would perform afterward.”
The result wasn’t good: “As it turned out, mental fatigue significantly affected the men’s endurance. They tired about 13 percent faster after the computer test than after watching “Earth.” They also reported that the workout felt far more taxing.”
That’s from How Intense Study May Harm Our Workouts by Gretchen Reynolds in the New York Times.
And it mirrors a concern raised by some academics about the difficulty they have combining thinking, researching, and writing with athletic training. Indeed, a doctoral student sent us the link to Reynolds’ column and asked us to blog about our answers. She reports having a really hard time switching gears from academic work to athletic training.
I’m not sure I have much helpful to add. I will say I much prefer intense exercise in the early morning. I’m a fidgety person and being physically tired actually allows me to focus in on my academic work. My preferred writing state is post bike workout, physically exhausted and mentally alert.
I’ve written before about the very high intelligence of elite athletes. But it may be that they are putting their big brains to work in service of their athletic goals. Likely they are not combining study with training.
These days I do rowing and Aikido in the evening and they are much more about skill acquisition for me at this stage. That is, they are technically rather than physically exhausting. After I flop in the hot tub and maybe play cards but I’m not up for anything intellectually challenging. (Indeed, I often blame my lousy performance in cards on the workout before hand.)
But you dear readers, what do you do? Lots of academics with pretty demanding training schedules read our blog, I know. Can you help out the PhD student who wrote in? Do you experience this problem? What’s your advice?
