The link between physical and mental fatigue - Prof. Bart Roelands , PhD ( Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)

Sports science lecture on the role of physical and mental fatigue in sports

Free to attend

Bart Roelands is a Professor at the Human Physiology and Sports Physiotherapy Research Group of the faculty of Physical Education and Physiotherapy at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Research interests:

Physical fatigue, thermoregulation and brain neurotransmission during prolonged exercise.
Every athlete will experience fatigue on a regular basis. It may be fatigue because of a short term intensive exercise such as a 200m sprint, or the fatigue experienced by a triathlete after an 11 hour race. In exercise physiology fatigue can be defined as an acute impairment of exercise performance which leads to an inability to produce maximal force output possible due to metabolite accumulation or substrate depletion. The processes that lead to decrements in performance can occur at every level of the brain-muscle pathway and although literature made a distinction between peripheral and central fatigue, one should be aware that both pathways are integrated. This line of research focuses on the central (brain and its neurotransmitters) component of fatigue.

Mental fatigue and physical and cognitive capacity.

The study of mental fatigue combines aspects of both exercise physiology and psychology and as such might prove to be a valuable asset in the search for mechanisms of fatigue in sports science. This line of mental fatigue attempts to provide some further insights in the mechanisms behind the underperformance on physical/cognitive tasks following the execution of a prolonged demanding cognitive task