Why the study?
Does mental fatigue affect aerobic performance differently in male versus female professional runners?
Does mental fatigue affect aerobic performance differently in male versus female professional runners?
Mental fatigue worsens aerobic performance and increases perceived effort in professional runners, with no significant differences between men and women.
May prompt strategies to mitigate mental fatigue before competition in professional runners; leaves open generalizability and intervention efficacy.
The prolonged cognitive task provoked mental fatigue, anticipated attainment of maximal perceived effort, and worsened aerobic performance in professional runners with no sex differences. Although we did not contrasted athletes with nonathletes, our results suggest that being an athlete may somehow prevent women from developing greater mental fatigue and suffering more from its underlying effects compared with men.
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Lopes et al. (2020) studied this question.
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