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u/Same_Row_761

Research shows mental fatigue makes the same running pace feel harder without changing your fitness, and there's a surprisingly simple thing that partially offsets it
🔥 Hot ▲ 116 r/ultrarunning

Research shows mental fatigue makes the same running pace feel harder without changing your fitness, and there's a surprisingly simple thing that partially offsets it

There's a finding from the running research that I think most runners have experienced without knowing there's a name for it.

Mental fatigue from cognitive work, your job, studying, sustained screen time, inflates your perception of effort while running. Your VO2max hasn't dropped. Your lactate threshold is the same. But the same pace feels harder than it should. Your easy run feels like tempo pace and you can't settle into a rhythm. That much is fairly well established in the research.

But here's the part that caught my attention: the type of mental fatigue might matter. There's emerging evidence that active cognitive work (problem-solving, sustained attention tasks) and passive cognitive drain (boredom, monotonous screen time) may affect running performance differently. A study by Pickering et al. (2024) found that active and passive mental fatigue affect 3km running performance in distinct ways. Most of the research uses active cognitive tasks in the lab, but most runners show up to train after a mixed bag of both. We don't really know how that translates yet.

There's also a neat finding that I think a lot of runners will recognise: self-selected music partially offsets the effects of mental fatigue on running performance. Which raises questions about whether the impairment is purely about cognitive resource depletion or something more nuanced about motivation and attentional focus. It might explain why some post-work runs feel completely different with headphones in.

I'm a PhD researcher at the University of Derby, and I also work at Lattice Training, a climbing performance company. I know, a climbing researcher in a running sub. But my research is on mental fatigue across all sports, and I'm building a sport-specific questionnaire to measure it properly because the current tools were borrowed from clinical psychology and aren't fit for purpose. I need runners in this study.

Have you noticed a difference between runs after stressful work days versus lighter ones, even when your body felt the same? Do you think the type of mental load matters, or is tired brain just tired brain? And does music genuinely change how your post-work runs feel, or is that just a mood thing?

If you're interested in contributing to the research, I've got a ~10 minute survey here: https://derby.questionpro.eu/t/AB3vCJoZB3waVr

u/Same_Row_761 — 4 days ago
🔥 Hot ▲ 75 r/indoorbouldering

3 weeks ago I posted about climbing having zero mental fatigue research. The responses from climbers, runners and cyclists are revealing an interesting pattern.

A few weeks ago I posted here about the fact that there's no mental fatigue research on climbing, despite it being one of the most cognitively demanding sports out there. The discussion was genuinely useful, and a lot of you described exactly the kind of thing the research predicts: route reading falling apart after long work days, commitment dropping, feeling mentally foggy even though your body was ready to go.

Since then I've been collecting responses from athletes across multiple sports, and something interesting is emerging. Climbers describe the effects of mental fatigue differently from endurance athletes. Runners and cyclists tend to talk about effort perception: the same pace feeling harder than it should. Climbers talk about cognitive processing: not being able to read problems, hesitating on sequences, losing the ability to adapt mid-route. It's early data and I can't draw conclusions yet, but the pattern maps onto something the research has been hinting at for a while. Sports with high cognitive-perceptual demands might experience mental fatigue through a different mechanism than sports where the primary demand is sustained effort (Smith et al., 2018; Van Cutsem et al., 2017).

If that holds up, it would mean climbers don't just get tired brains like everyone else. The way mental fatigue degrades climbing performance might be fundamentally different from how it degrades a time trial or a 10k. And that matters for how you'd manage it.

I'm a PhD researcher at the University of Derby and I work at Lattice Training. This is a cross-sport study building a proper measurement tool for mental fatigue in sport, because the existing ones were designed for clinical settings and don't capture what athletes actually experience.

I'd genuinely like to hear from climbers on this: how does mental fatigue show up differently in climbing versus other sports you do? Is it purely about decision-making and route reading, or do you notice effort perception changes too? And do you think the climbing community underestimates how much your cognitive state before the session affects session quality?

reddit.com
u/Same_Row_761 — 4 days ago
🔥 Hot ▲ 164 r/climbharder

3 weeks ago I posted about climbing having zero mental fatigue research. The responses from climbers, runners and cyclists are revealing an interesting pattern.

A few weeks ago I posted here about the fact that there's no mental fatigue research on climbing, despite it being one of the most cognitively demanding sports out there. The discussion was genuinely useful, and a lot of you described exactly the kind of thing the research predicts: route reading falling apart after long work days, commitment dropping, feeling mentally foggy even though your body was ready to go.

Since then I've been collecting responses from athletes across multiple sports, and something interesting is emerging. Climbers describe the effects of mental fatigue differently from endurance athletes. Runners and cyclists tend to talk about effort perception: the same pace feeling harder than it should. Climbers talk about cognitive processing: not being able to read problems, hesitating on sequences, losing the ability to adapt mid-route. It's early data and I can't draw conclusions yet, but the pattern maps onto something the research has been hinting at for a while. Sports with high cognitive-perceptual demands might experience mental fatigue through a different mechanism than sports where the primary demand is sustained effort (Smith et al., 2018; Van Cutsem et al., 2017).

If that holds up, it would mean climbers don't just get tired brains like everyone else. The way mental fatigue degrades climbing performance might be fundamentally different from how it degrades a time trial or a 10k. And that matters for how you'd manage it.

I'm a PhD researcher at the University of Derby and I work at Lattice Training. This is a cross-sport study building a proper measurement tool for mental fatigue in sport, because the existing ones were designed for clinical settings and don't capture what athletes actually experience.

I'd genuinely like to hear from climbers on this: how does mental fatigue show up differently in climbing versus other sports you do? Is it purely about decision-making and route reading, or do you notice effort perception changes too? And do you think the climbing community underestimates how much your cognitive state before the session affects session quality?

reddit.com
u/Same_Row_761 — 4 days ago