Excessive athletic training weakens brain, finds study

Sep 27, 2019

New Delhi, Sep 28 (ANI): Researchers claims that excessive athletic training not only makes one's body tired but also drains the brain. When researchers imposed an excessive training load on triathletes, they showed a form of mental fatigue. This fatigue included reduced activity in a portion of the brain important for making decisions. The athletes also acted more impulsively, opting for immediate rewards instead of bigger ones that would take longer to achieve, reported the study published in the journal 'Current Biology'. Together, the studies suggest a connection between mental and physical effort: both require cognitive control. The reason such control is essential in demanding athletic training, they suggest, is that to maintain physical effort and reach a distant goal requires cognitive control. Some athletes had suffered from "overtraining syndrome," in which their performance plummeted as they experienced an overwhelming sense of fatigue. The researchers monitored athletes physical performance during cycling exercises performed on rest days and assessed their subjective experience of fatigue using questionnaires every two days. They also conducted behavioural testing and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning experiments. The evidence showed that physical training overload led the athletes to feel more fatigued. They also acted more impulsively in standard tests used to evaluate how they'd make economic choices. This tendency was shown as a bias in favouring immediate over delayed rewards. The brains of athletes who'd been overloaded physically also showed diminished activation of the lateral prefrontal cortex, a key region of the executive control system, as they made those economic choices. It suggested it may also be important to monitor fatigue level in order to prevent bad decisions from being made in the political, judicial, or economic domains.