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This article is part of a series:
→ Part 1 — What is fatigue?
→ Part 2 — Do your muscles slow you down?
→ Part 3 — Does your brain slow you down?
→ Part 4 — Why do you slow down?
→ Part 5 — How to resist slowing down.
→ Part 6 — There’s always something left in the tank.
→ Part 1 — What is fatigue?
→ Part 2 — Do your muscles slow you down?
→ Part 3 — Does your brain slow you down?
→ Part 4 — Why do you slow down?
→ Part 5 — How to resist slowing down.
→ Part 6 — There’s always something left in the tank.
Fatigue in runners. Part 5 of 6:
How can you resist fatigue and stop yourself slowing down? Become a Jedi of the Fatigue Resistance.
Thomas Solomon PhD.
30th April 2022.
Now you understand what fatigue is (Part 1) and, having gone deep on the causes of fatigue (Part 2 & Part 3), you now understand how and why you slow down during endurance exercise (Part 4 ). But, to be the best athlete you can be, one very important question remains… How can you resist fatigue for as long as possible during your races? Today, I go deep on answering that question to help you complete your training in becoming a Jedi of the Fatigue Resistance.
Reading time ~25-mins.
Or listen to the Podcast version.
Or listen to the Podcast version.
Since I was a child, I've had a recurring nightmare in which a less-than-friendly alien busts into my house and goes on a rampage but when I try to escape like an elegant and economical butterfly floating on the wind, I can't… I am stuck and can only move like a heavy, sludge-dredging tug boat spluttering the doom of time. Whenever I have encountered such levels of fatigue during a race, I always think “fecking aliens!”. Consequently, I’ve spent the past 42 years trying to develop strategies to beat the alien.
Given what you’ve learned about the causes of fatigue during exercise, you can now rationalise why you might lack optimal fatigue tolerance. Doing so can help understand how to resist fatigue. Since you are now ready to begin your training in becoming a Jedi of the Fatigue Resistance, to become strong in the ways of the force against fatigue, you must learn from Luke Skyrunner, the Jedi Master of Fatigue Resistance. He is, after all, an expert in dealing with aliens.
From a metabolic perspective, fatigue resistance is essentially determined by the amount of power available to you (aka the rate at which you can burn fuel to produce energy) before you reach a “critical threshold” of metabolite accumulation within your muscle fibres. This is further influenced by your underlying level of total energy availability, which when you are working hard is driven by your carbohydrate availability (glycogen levels and/or ingested carbs) during exercise. From a cardiopulmonary perspective, fatigue resistance is determined by how high a fraction of your V̇O2max you can sustain for long periods. From a water and sodium balance perspective, fatigue resistance is determined by the level of dehydration and sodium loss your body can tolerate. From a thermoregulatory perspective, fatigue resistance is determined by your heat (or cold) tolerance and how well your body can lose (or maintain) heat to maintain thermoneutrality. From a neurophysiological perspective, fatigue resistance is determined by how well your brain can send signals via the spine to your muscles and for how long it is willing to do so. But, in concert with physiology, we must also acknowledge that fatigue also involves psychology and emotions and therefore, from a psychological and emotional perspective, fatigue resistance is also determined by your pain tolerance, your desire to stop, and how motivated you are to keep going. All these “knowns” provide clues as to how to resist fatigue for as long as possible — i.e. how to go hard and not go home.
But, during a race, how do you know which “fatigue unit” is at work?
Look for signs… Some “biomarkers” help indicate which “things” are occurring… a feeling of thirst, a craving for salt, hunger, a feeling of heaviness/sluggishness, feelings of thermal discomfort (if it’s hot) or a feeling of cold and shivering (if it’s cold), soreness/pain, muscle cramps, a lack of motivation, etc. How simple. But, of course, the problem is that for many “fatigue units” there are no signs.
So, then what do you do?
You must preempt the many causes of fatigue by adjusting your training and life habits like a Jedi of the Fatigue Resistance would do.
Now you are fully versed in the many paths to the Darkside, you are now also armed with many clues as to how to mitigate fatigue. So, here is Luke Skyrunner’s checklist of how to become a Jedi of the Fatigue Resistance:
To achieve a calm body and a calm mind on the morning of your “A” race, during race week, taper your training load, eat as well as possible, and put things in place to sleep as much and as well as possible while clearing excessively cognitively-demanding tasks from your schedule. Mental fatigue can arise from anything that causes a heavy cognitive load, which includes anything that burdens your mind — stressing over your training, your nutrition choices, your recovery choices etc etc. Therefore, having someone (a coach, advisor, or training group) or something (a training plan or app) take care of your training might help create some brain calm.
Race travel is also cognitively demanding. Rather than enduring a John Candy-esque expedition of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles on the day before your race or, worse, the morning of your race, why not travel to your “A” race 2- or 3-days ahead of time? You will recover from the travel, adjust to the new environment, and have time to locate food and find ways to rest and sleep. This might sound extreme and possibly expensive but then why are you diverting so much of your time towards training if you aren’t willing to focus time on nailing race day? The cost of an extra night in a hotel or AirBnb is less than the cost of some random “fatigue-prevention” device or a pair of new shoes.
And one last thing… Naturally, sleep deprivation during long (overnight) ultras is unavoidable but there’s not much you can do about that during a race except getting used to running in the dark, and/or taking caffeine (more on that later, and in my sports supplements tool)...
Pretty cool.
Now is the time you might expect me to dive into the precise ways to train to achieve these things. But, I will not. Firstly, because training is highly nuanced to you and, secondly, because I’m planning a separate series on said topic. But, to be brief, to be the best endurance athlete you can be, your training will need to raise your V̇O2max, while allowing you to sustain the highest fraction of your V̇O2max for as long as possible, while lowering your energy cost of running, increasing your speed, and making you more durable for the duration of your event. You will need longer sessions (some easy, some faster), medium-large sessions (threshold work), and some shorter, faster stuff. You will need some strength and power stuff (sprints, hill work, weight lifting, and plyometrics). And, you will need to work on your technical skills (descending, climbing) and your race day tactics and pacing. Basically, leave no stone unturned. But, also be gradual… With the exception of beautiful sunrises, great things do not develop overnight.
Low blood oxygen saturation due to hypoxia (aka “thin air” at altitude) and/or low blood haemoglobin mass (aka anaemia caused by low iron stores and/or blood loss) reduces oxygen delivery to your heart, muscles, and other organs, limiting exercise capacity and causing fatigue during exercise. Chronic fatigue in athletes can also be caused by low iron stores (indicated by low plasma ferritin) or low blood haemoglobin (anaemia) — ask your doctor for a blood test to rule that out. Altitude, on the other hand, is not something your doctor can remedy (except for dodgy scoundrels like Michele Ferrari) but acclimating by sleeping “high” and/or training “high” (at altitude or in a hypoxic chamber) might manifest better performance at altitude and/or at sea level. That said, altitude training and its adaptations are very complex, take weeks to manifest, and are highly nuanced to individual athletes. And, whether altitude training is of benefit to athletes beyond a focussed training block at home is heavily debated (for vs. against). It is also important to know that restrictive breathing masks (marketed as “altitude masks”) do not simulate altitude and simply make inhalation more difficult; they will just make training feel harder, forcing you to go slower, ultimately not boosting your performance. I plan to go deep on this topic soon but you can read more in a 2020 debate between Gregoire Millet and Franck Brocherie vs. Christophe Siebenmann and Jerry Dempsey (see here and here).
Besides getting too “high”, hot conditions can slow you down and cause exercise-associated muscle cramps. Using heat acclimation strategies is a robust way to help maintain power output when racing in the heat and in the cool. This can be achieved using a short-term period (e.g. 2-weeks) of daily heat exposure during your sessions (aka, active heat acclimation). But this can be a little complicated and the heat will force you to train at a lower absolute intensity. Alternatively, 2-weeks of daily post-session heat exposure in a sauna or hot bath (aka, passive heat acclimation) is simpler, as effective, and does not interfere with training intensity, but does add additional time to your training. Go deep on heat acclimation at veohtu.com/heat-3-howtoheatacclimate.
Cold conditions can also slow you down. Using cold acclimation strategies might help some folks race better in the cold but adaptations to chronic cold exposure are typically small, slow to develop, and variable between people. Go deep on this at veohtu.com/traininginthecold3.
Similarly…
If you plan on racing long in hot conditions, training in a dehydrated state WILL NOT protect you against the negative effects of dehydration — training in a dehydrated state is stupid because you’ll increase your risk of heat stress and end up running at a slower pace (a lower absolute intensity), thus detraining yourself. Instead, to stay hydrated during a race while minimising your risk of overhydration (aka hyperhydration) and low blood sodium (aka hyponatremia), you can use a simple approach: If you feel thirsty, drink some fluid; if you crave something salty, eat something salty. But, there may be situations when you need a more refined and nuanced approach that perhaps requires sodium supplementation (check out veohtu.com/hydration-4-whatyoucando for more info).
This does not mean that you have to eat a high carb diet every day, or that you have to eat a high carb meal before every session, or that you have to feed carbs during every session — sometimes, it is fine to “train low”. But, to be the best endurance athlete you can be, it is never sensible to “race low”. If you want to run hard and delay fatigue for a long time, it is advisable to maximise your muscle glycogen store before race day with 1-2 days of a high-carb diet (~10 grams of carbs per kilogram bodyweight per day), maximise your liver glycogen store on race morning with a carb-containing meal, and plan on maintaining high-carb availability by regularly consuming carbohydrates during the race (~30 to 90 grams/hour every ~10 to 20 mins, depending on intensity, tolerance, and practicality). I went deep on how to do these things at veohtu.com/racedaynutrition.
Carbohydrate feeding during exercise primarily prevents you slowing down due to effects on “peripheral” fatigue mechanisms, particularly in your muscles, but some evidence supports a potential role of during-exercise carbohydrate feeding on “central” fatigue. Therefore, race-day carbs might keep both your body and your mind in the game. Either way, don’t leave this stone unturned.
But, how on Earth do you do that?
With Jedi “mind tricks”. Welcome to performance psychology...
I don’t want to wade too deep here because I plan to dive into performance psychology in the future. But, since this topic is highly relevant to why you slow down and since your decision to slow down when things get tough is due to a complex interaction of your Effort (RPE), the Hazard of continued effort, and your Enjoyment, Motivation, and Belief, it would be rather Fader-like of me to ignore the several simple approaches that help keep race day motivation as high as a Jedi of the Fatigue Resistance. These include: Self-talk, Mindfulness, Imagery, and even Caffeine.
I’m no wizard. I’ve not conjured up these things and my empirical observations have not led to an amazingly novel discovery. Instead, through practice, I merely stumbled across what experts in psychology have been studying for close to 100-years — psychology is paramount for high-performance. A 2016 meta-analyses found that psychological interventions have moderate sized benefit on sports performance (Hedges’ g effect sizes = 0.57, 95% confidence interval 0.22 to 0.92). But, be careful, psychology can yield a lightsaber on both sides of the force… A 2022 systematic review of all known meta-analyses of sport psychology and performance found that mood disturbances like anxiety, tension, and depression, and having an egocentric motivational climate have small negative effects on performance (effect sizes: Cohen’s d = -0.2 to -0.5). Meanwhile, many tools help improve performance: emotional intelligence, goal setting, and self-talk (small beneficial effect sizes: d = +0.2 to +0.5); visualisation and imagery (moderate beneficial effect sizes: d = +0.5 to +0.8); task cohesion (i.e. how attracted you are to the task) and self-efficacy aka belief (large beneficial effect sizes: d = +0.82 and +1.0, respectively); and mindfulness (very large effect size: d = +1.35)...
Then, there’s caffeine…
How?
Because caffeine can enter your brain and inhibit adenosine receptors.
Say what? A rise in adenosine levels, which happens during exercise, is proposed to block the release of neurotransmitters like dopamine, resulting in a greater perception of effort (RPE) and a decrease in motivation to keep going (first proposed here, then reviewed here & here). Therefore, caffeine prevents adenosine binding to its receptor thus allowing dopamine to continue being secreted, keeping motivation high, RPE under control, and Lord Fader away. This partly explains why caffeine is such a potent performance enhancer.
Yes, there are a couple of novel approaches that target the brain — brain training and transcranial stimulation.
So, brain endurance training is a very mentally-fatiguing way to train and nothing is known about its effects in endurance athletes. You’re probably better off investing your time getting your shiz (training, sleeping, eating, resting) in order.
But, what about zapping the brain with electricity?
Why would they do that?
There is a region in our brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex that governs inhibitory control. Transcranial direct current stimulation (or tDCS) of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex can improve inhibitory control. Since you know that slowing down during exercise can start in the brain, you might ask, “can you override it?”. Some scientists asked that question and early evidence showed that pre-exercise tDCS might influence exercise performance. But several systematic reviews and meta-analyses now exist (see here, here [correction here], here, & here)…
The evidence shows that while tDCS may have a positive impact on exercise performance the effect is typically small (effect sizes ~0.3) and studies are generally of low quality with evidence of publication bias (i.e. the selective publication of significant results, as shown by funnel plots illustrating that effect sizes for individual studies tend to be larger in studies with lower sample sizes and higher variability). Beneficial effects tend to be found for maximal voluntary contraction and muscular endurance during isometric contractions (prolonged holds to failure) and muscle strength, not endurance performance. While tDCS may have a small beneficial effect on lowering RPE and enhancing low-intensity running and cycling time-to-exhaustion, it does not affect endurance time trial performance or sprint performance.
In reality, very little low current electricity applied to the skull actually reaches the brain. Furthermore, randomly firing electrical pulses into your skull is not effective for anything at all — specific regions need to be activated and this requires the expert hand of a neuroscientist. So, don’t waste your money on “neuropriming” headphones just yet. If wild things like brain endurance training and transcranial electrical stimulation were truly effective, then we’d see world-class endurance athletes using them. That we do not is ample evidence not to bother.
All these tools in your fatigue resistance toolbox — sleeping, resting, eating, training, acclimating, cooling, motivating, believing, etc — are a bit like the “waste pipe” in Guillaume Millet’s “flush” model of fatigue — RPE gradually increases during a race (due to the accumulation of what I call “fatigue units”) but can be tempered by using Jedi-like fatigue resistance strategies.
Keeping your race day RPE under control will help resist fatigue. Your race effort (RPE) is driven by a combination of the external load (pace/speed) and how well conditioned (physically, psychologically, and emotionally) you are to deal with it.
Fatigue (slowing down) during exercise comes in many forms — physiological, psychological, and emotional. You need to be physically ready, psychologically competent, and emotionally intelligent. So, to help delay a race day visit from the Sith Lord of Fatigue for as long as possible and become a Jedi of the Fatigue Resistance, use Luke Skyrunner’s Fatigue Resistance checklist:
That completes your training as a Jedi of the Fatigue Resistance . Until next time, may the force be with you...
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Given what you’ve learned about the causes of fatigue during exercise, you can now rationalise why you might lack optimal fatigue tolerance. Doing so can help understand how to resist fatigue. Since you are now ready to begin your training in becoming a Jedi of the Fatigue Resistance, to become strong in the ways of the force against fatigue, you must learn from Luke Skyrunner, the Jedi Master of Fatigue Resistance. He is, after all, an expert in dealing with aliens.
From a metabolic perspective, fatigue resistance is essentially determined by the amount of power available to you (aka the rate at which you can burn fuel to produce energy) before you reach a “critical threshold” of metabolite accumulation within your muscle fibres. This is further influenced by your underlying level of total energy availability, which when you are working hard is driven by your carbohydrate availability (glycogen levels and/or ingested carbs) during exercise. From a cardiopulmonary perspective, fatigue resistance is determined by how high a fraction of your V̇O2max you can sustain for long periods. From a water and sodium balance perspective, fatigue resistance is determined by the level of dehydration and sodium loss your body can tolerate. From a thermoregulatory perspective, fatigue resistance is determined by your heat (or cold) tolerance and how well your body can lose (or maintain) heat to maintain thermoneutrality. From a neurophysiological perspective, fatigue resistance is determined by how well your brain can send signals via the spine to your muscles and for how long it is willing to do so. But, in concert with physiology, we must also acknowledge that fatigue also involves psychology and emotions and therefore, from a psychological and emotional perspective, fatigue resistance is also determined by your pain tolerance, your desire to stop, and how motivated you are to keep going. All these “knowns” provide clues as to how to resist fatigue for as long as possible — i.e. how to go hard and not go home.
What can you do to stop slowing down?
Remember:
Fatigue during exercise is slowing down when you don’t expect (or want) to.
Of all the theoretical models of fatigue, the precise complex mechanisms do not matter for a coach or an athlete. It doesn't matter whether lactate is a cause or biomarker of fatigue — such things are merely signals (or trigger signals) to warn the brain and your brain responds by protecting its chassis—it slows you down. Instead…
Understanding the many ways fatigue can arise can help inform you on how to train to meet the needs of your event.
The goal of your training is to resist fatigue for longer when operating at a higher workload — to move faster for longer. To accomplish that, you need to increase your “specific endurance” relevant to your target event. To be successful over your race distance, you need to be able to keep sending signals from your brain to the muscles, your muscles need to respond to the signals, you need to increase the maximum number of fibres you can recruit, increase the percentage of those fibres that you can use during a race, recruit those fibres for as long as possible, be able to metabolise fuel and produce energy at a high rate while minimising hydrogen ion accumulation at race pace, all the while keeping your body cool and, most importantly, staying motivated to keep pushing. In essence, this can be reduced down to a simple goal:
Your training needs to delay the build-up of fatigue signals.
And
Delay the reduction in muscle fibre recruitment.
In Part 2 and Part 3 you learned about the “pick and mix” of physiological, psychological, and emotional factors that increase the likelihood of a mid-race visit from Lord Fader . In Part 4, I brought all this knowledge together to create a “fatigue checklist” of all the things that can slow you down on race day:
Pre-existing or increasing muscle damage, and/or soreness, and/or pain.
Decreasing muscle fibre recruitment (aka neuromuscular dysfunction) leading to less force production.
Low and/or decreasing fuel stores — glycogen and/or phosphocreatine depletion.
Increasing hydrogen ion accumulation (aka metabolic acidosis due to low pH) and increasing lactate concentrations.
Low blood glucose concentration (aka hypoglycemia).
High and/or increasing core temperature (leading to decreased thermal comfort and hyperthermia). Or, on the flip side, low and/or decreasing core temperature (leading to hypothermia).
Low and/or decreasing body water store (aka dehydration) and/or decreasing plasma sodium concentration (leading to hyponatremia).
Low blood oxygen saturation due to hypoxia (“thin air” at altitude) and/or low blood haemoglobin mass (aka anaemia caused by low iron stores and/or blood loss).
Increasing perception of effort (aka rising RPE), and/or increasing hazard of effort (vs. how much further there is), and/or decreasing positive affect of effort (aka loss of enjoyment).
Running far too hard far too soon — a terrible pacing strategy causing all of the above to happen far sooner than desired.
High level of and/or increasing amount of cognitively demanding tasks (leading to mental fatigue and stress).
Lack of and/or decreasing drive (aka low motivation) and/or lack of belief (aka low self-efficacy).
If we conceptualise this list of things as “fatigue units”,
Decreasing muscle fibre recruitment (aka neuromuscular dysfunction) leading to less force production.
Low and/or decreasing fuel stores — glycogen and/or phosphocreatine depletion.
Increasing hydrogen ion accumulation (aka metabolic acidosis due to low pH) and increasing lactate concentrations.
Low blood glucose concentration (aka hypoglycemia).
High and/or increasing core temperature (leading to decreased thermal comfort and hyperthermia). Or, on the flip side, low and/or decreasing core temperature (leading to hypothermia).
Low and/or decreasing body water store (aka dehydration) and/or decreasing plasma sodium concentration (leading to hyponatremia).
Low blood oxygen saturation due to hypoxia (“thin air” at altitude) and/or low blood haemoglobin mass (aka anaemia caused by low iron stores and/or blood loss).
Increasing perception of effort (aka rising RPE), and/or increasing hazard of effort (vs. how much further there is), and/or decreasing positive affect of effort (aka loss of enjoyment).
Running far too hard far too soon — a terrible pacing strategy causing all of the above to happen far sooner than desired.
High level of and/or increasing amount of cognitively demanding tasks (leading to mental fatigue and stress).
Lack of and/or decreasing drive (aka low motivation) and/or lack of belief (aka low self-efficacy).
You must design your training to reduce the number and/or the rate of accumulation of “fatigue units” when moving at race pace.
And…
You must design your training to help you deal with the maximum number of “fatigue units” that will accumulate during a race.
It will come as no surprise that our running speed decreases with increasing duration. This relationship shows that we have a huge capacity to move fast but can only access small amounts of that capacity to go long — how annoying. But this is explained by the accumulation of the numerous “fatigue units” with increasing speed and duration, many of which — hyperthermia, dehydration, acidosis, hypoglycemia — would kill us if we didn’t slow down.
But, during a race, how do you know which “fatigue unit” is at work?
Look for signs… Some “biomarkers” help indicate which “things” are occurring… a feeling of thirst, a craving for salt, hunger, a feeling of heaviness/sluggishness, feelings of thermal discomfort (if it’s hot) or a feeling of cold and shivering (if it’s cold), soreness/pain, muscle cramps, a lack of motivation, etc. How simple. But, of course, the problem is that for many “fatigue units” there are no signs.
So, then what do you do?
You must preempt the many causes of fatigue by adjusting your training and life habits like a Jedi of the Fatigue Resistance would do.
Now you are fully versed in the many paths to the Darkside, you are now also armed with many clues as to how to mitigate fatigue. So, here is Luke Skyrunner’s checklist of how to become a Jedi of the Fatigue Resistance:
Sleeping lots, resting adequately, clearing your mind, and stress-free travel will delay a visit from Lord Fader.
Insufficient sleep, inadequate rest, and cognitively-demanding tasks independently impair neuromuscular function and reduce endurance and strength performance (see veohtu.com/sleep, veohtu.com/rest, and Part 3). Therefore, doing your best to maximise quality sleep and physical and mental rest prior to a race will help you resist fatigue for longer on race day.To achieve a calm body and a calm mind on the morning of your “A” race, during race week, taper your training load, eat as well as possible, and put things in place to sleep as much and as well as possible while clearing excessively cognitively-demanding tasks from your schedule. Mental fatigue can arise from anything that causes a heavy cognitive load, which includes anything that burdens your mind — stressing over your training, your nutrition choices, your recovery choices etc etc. Therefore, having someone (a coach, advisor, or training group) or something (a training plan or app) take care of your training might help create some brain calm.
Race travel is also cognitively demanding. Rather than enduring a John Candy-esque expedition of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles on the day before your race or, worse, the morning of your race, why not travel to your “A” race 2- or 3-days ahead of time? You will recover from the travel, adjust to the new environment, and have time to locate food and find ways to rest and sleep. This might sound extreme and possibly expensive but then why are you diverting so much of your time towards training if you aren’t willing to focus time on nailing race day? The cost of an extra night in a hotel or AirBnb is less than the cost of some random “fatigue-prevention” device or a pair of new shoes.
And one last thing… Naturally, sleep deprivation during long (overnight) ultras is unavoidable but there’s not much you can do about that during a race except getting used to running in the dark, and/or taking caffeine (more on that later, and in my sports supplements tool)...
Training to meet the imposed demands of your event will improve your fatigue resistance.
This includes adapting to the duration, intensity, and technicality of your race using regular situational exposure, which helps you feel more comfortable being uncomfortable while helping you learn to believe in your abilities. Situational exposure also helps you adapt to resist muscle damage for longer, thus delaying muscle soreness and/or pain later in the race. Your training adaptations help your heart pump more blood per beat (increased stroke volume and cardiac output) and deliver more oxygen and nutrients to the working muscles. Your training adaptations also help you store more fuel in your muscle cells — glycogen and intramuscular triglycerides — so there are more rapidly-accessible glucose and fatty acid molecules available for energy production. And your training adaptations help you “burn” your fuel more efficiently. And, importantly, your training helps you adapt to keep sending large action potentials (electrical signals) to the motor units that innervate your muscle cells. In other words, training delays neuromuscular fatigue — regular sessions help your brain keep sending large electrical signals to stimulate your muscle fibres to contract for longer, while your muscle fibres also become more sensitive to the electrical signals so that you need smaller and fewer signals to recruit the same number of fibres.Pretty cool.
Now is the time you might expect me to dive into the precise ways to train to achieve these things. But, I will not. Firstly, because training is highly nuanced to you and, secondly, because I’m planning a separate series on said topic. But, to be brief, to be the best endurance athlete you can be, your training will need to raise your V̇O2max, while allowing you to sustain the highest fraction of your V̇O2max for as long as possible, while lowering your energy cost of running, increasing your speed, and making you more durable for the duration of your event. You will need longer sessions (some easy, some faster), medium-large sessions (threshold work), and some shorter, faster stuff. You will need some strength and power stuff (sprints, hill work, weight lifting, and plyometrics). And, you will need to work on your technical skills (descending, climbing) and your race day tactics and pacing. Basically, leave no stone unturned. But, also be gradual… With the exception of beautiful sunrises, great things do not develop overnight.
Acclimatising or acclimating to the expected environmental conditions of your event will help keep Lord Fader away.
Getting too “high”, too hot, or too cold can impair your endurance capacity and cause you to slow down sooner. Of course, you could go live and train at the race venue for several weeks before race day to naturally acclimatise to the local environmental conditions but, unless you are a well-funded professional athlete, this is not practical. Alternatively, artificial acclimation strategies using purposeful regular exposure to environmental extremes can be a useful tool for some folks.Low blood oxygen saturation due to hypoxia (aka “thin air” at altitude) and/or low blood haemoglobin mass (aka anaemia caused by low iron stores and/or blood loss) reduces oxygen delivery to your heart, muscles, and other organs, limiting exercise capacity and causing fatigue during exercise. Chronic fatigue in athletes can also be caused by low iron stores (indicated by low plasma ferritin) or low blood haemoglobin (anaemia) — ask your doctor for a blood test to rule that out. Altitude, on the other hand, is not something your doctor can remedy (except for dodgy scoundrels like Michele Ferrari) but acclimating by sleeping “high” and/or training “high” (at altitude or in a hypoxic chamber) might manifest better performance at altitude and/or at sea level. That said, altitude training and its adaptations are very complex, take weeks to manifest, and are highly nuanced to individual athletes. And, whether altitude training is of benefit to athletes beyond a focussed training block at home is heavily debated (for vs. against). It is also important to know that restrictive breathing masks (marketed as “altitude masks”) do not simulate altitude and simply make inhalation more difficult; they will just make training feel harder, forcing you to go slower, ultimately not boosting your performance. I plan to go deep on this topic soon but you can read more in a 2020 debate between Gregoire Millet and Franck Brocherie vs. Christophe Siebenmann and Jerry Dempsey (see here and here).
Besides getting too “high”, hot conditions can slow you down and cause exercise-associated muscle cramps. Using heat acclimation strategies is a robust way to help maintain power output when racing in the heat and in the cool. This can be achieved using a short-term period (e.g. 2-weeks) of daily heat exposure during your sessions (aka, active heat acclimation). But this can be a little complicated and the heat will force you to train at a lower absolute intensity. Alternatively, 2-weeks of daily post-session heat exposure in a sauna or hot bath (aka, passive heat acclimation) is simpler, as effective, and does not interfere with training intensity, but does add additional time to your training. Go deep on heat acclimation at veohtu.com/heat-3-howtoheatacclimate.
Cold conditions can also slow you down. Using cold acclimation strategies might help some folks race better in the cold but adaptations to chronic cold exposure are typically small, slow to develop, and variable between people. Go deep on this at veohtu.com/traininginthecold3.
Similarly…
Staying cool if it is warm and staying warm if it is cold — thermoregulation — will delay a visit from the Sith Lord of Fatigue.
Like John Travolta, you need to “be cool” when working hard in the heat to delay the rise in your body temperature. The goal is to be cool, not cold, and I went deep on heat mitigation strategies using various cold-water-dowsing, ice-caps, and stay-in-the-shade approaches at veohtu.com/heat-2-howtostaycool... On the flipside, when it is cold, you need to maintain body temperature — appropriate clothing choices are critical and I went deep on this previously at veohtu.com/traininginthecold2.Staying hydrated will help delay a visit from Lord Fader.
Hydration is an emotional topic that fuels anger and rage in some folks; traits that can lead to the Dark side of the force. The current evidence shows that if you begin exercise in an adequately hydrated state (aka euhydrated) under normal environmental conditions then water leaving your body (aka dehydration) during exercise will probably not impair your performance. But… If it is hot and/or you start exercise poorly hydrated (aka hypohydrated) then, yes, dehydration during the race will probably impair your performance. (I went deep on this topic at veohtu.com/hydration-1-whatweknow.)If you plan on racing long in hot conditions, training in a dehydrated state WILL NOT protect you against the negative effects of dehydration — training in a dehydrated state is stupid because you’ll increase your risk of heat stress and end up running at a slower pace (a lower absolute intensity), thus detraining yourself. Instead, to stay hydrated during a race while minimising your risk of overhydration (aka hyperhydration) and low blood sodium (aka hyponatremia), you can use a simple approach: If you feel thirsty, drink some fluid; if you crave something salty, eat something salty. But, there may be situations when you need a more refined and nuanced approach that perhaps requires sodium supplementation (check out veohtu.com/hydration-4-whatyoucando for more info).
Establishing and maintaining high carbohydrate availability will help resist fatigue.
Carbohydrates also trigger emotions that can fuel anger and rage, leading to the Dark side of the force. But, as I’ve discussed in depth in my series on Nutritional Manipulations for Training and my series on Performance Nutrition, for optimal race-day endurance performance there really is no need for debate: starting a race with low muscle glycogen and low liver glycogen will make you slow down sooner.This does not mean that you have to eat a high carb diet every day, or that you have to eat a high carb meal before every session, or that you have to feed carbs during every session — sometimes, it is fine to “train low”. But, to be the best endurance athlete you can be, it is never sensible to “race low”. If you want to run hard and delay fatigue for a long time, it is advisable to maximise your muscle glycogen store before race day with 1-2 days of a high-carb diet (~10 grams of carbs per kilogram bodyweight per day), maximise your liver glycogen store on race morning with a carb-containing meal, and plan on maintaining high-carb availability by regularly consuming carbohydrates during the race (~30 to 90 grams/hour every ~10 to 20 mins, depending on intensity, tolerance, and practicality). I went deep on how to do these things at veohtu.com/racedaynutrition.
Carbohydrate feeding during exercise primarily prevents you slowing down due to effects on “peripheral” fatigue mechanisms, particularly in your muscles, but some evidence supports a potential role of during-exercise carbohydrate feeding on “central” fatigue. Therefore, race-day carbs might keep both your body and your mind in the game. Either way, don’t leave this stone unturned.
(Note: in addition to reading my series on Nutritional Manipulations for Training and my series on Performance Nutrition, you can stay up to date on the effects of high-carb vs. low-carb diets, pre-exercise carb intake, and during-exercise carb intake on performance by reading these systematic reviews.)
Maintaining phosphocreatine stores will help resist fatigue during maximal high-intensity efforts.
During maximal, high-intensity efforts, you rapidly deplete your muscle phosphocreatine store, which your muscles use to resynthesise ATP during sprints or heavy lifts, for example. To increase your muscle pool of phosphocreatine, daily creatine supplementation might help some folks resist fatigue during heavy lifting or sprints/high-intensity efforts less than ~30s to ~2-mins.Hydrogen ion buffering will help resist fatigue during short, high-intensity efforts.
During short (~30s to ~10-mins), high-intensity efforts, hydrogen ion (H+) accumulation in your muscles and blood can be rapid and excessive, lowering pH (aka increasing acidity). To improve your “acid buffering” capacity, pre-exercise sodium bicarbonate supplementation and/or daily beta-alanine supplementation might help some folks delay a visit from Lord Fader.Maintaining muscle power will help delay a visit from the Sith Lord of Fatigue during high-intensity aerobic efforts.
Decreasing speed or power (i.e. lessening rate of force development) during a race is not your friend. During short-to-medium duration time trials (up to ~40-minutes) and time-to-failure exercise tests, pre-exercise supplementation with nitrate might help some folks delay a visit from Lord Fader (likely due to improved economy, i.e. lower energy cost of exercise). But, the performance benefits of nitrate appear to be blunted in highly-trained athletes compared with lesser-trained folks.
(NOTE — coming soon — check out my Sports Supplements Tool at veohtu.com/sportssupplements to read all about creatine, beta-alanine, bicarbonate, nitrate, and more.
Keeping motivation high will keep Lord Fader at bay.
Having trained and raced since ~1992 and having coached athletes since ~2007, my empirical evidence collected over those 30 years has helped me form an opinion: the most important aspects of performance psychology are motivation, belief, and emotional intelligence... You need the motivation to train, the motivation to make the right choices, the motivation to be consistent, the motivation to push hard, and the motivation to win, while believing you can push hard and win; all supported by having the emotional intelligence to remain calm, in control, and stable in the face of change (caused by the weather, your fitness, your competitors, the terrain, and any other unexpected circumstances). But my opinion gets a little more complicated because those 30-years have also taught me that having high-levels of self-belief and emotional intelligence also fuel one’s motivation. So, to sum up my thoughts on this, consider this:
During a race, staying motivated to keep pushing hard no matter what is key!
You will tolerate more discomfort and enjoy a higher RPE for longer when you are highly motivated and believe you can.
Motivation is at the core of your race day performance. Motivation allows behaviour change. Without motivation, there is no behaviour. Always maintain motivation!
You will tolerate more discomfort and enjoy a higher RPE for longer when you are highly motivated and believe you can.
But, how on Earth do you do that?
With Jedi “mind tricks”. Welcome to performance psychology...
I don’t want to wade too deep here because I plan to dive into performance psychology in the future. But, since this topic is highly relevant to why you slow down and since your decision to slow down when things get tough is due to a complex interaction of your Effort (RPE), the Hazard of continued effort, and your Enjoyment, Motivation, and Belief, it would be rather Fader-like of me to ignore the several simple approaches that help keep race day motivation as high as a Jedi of the Fatigue Resistance. These include: Self-talk, Mindfulness, Imagery, and even Caffeine.
I’m no wizard. I’ve not conjured up these things and my empirical observations have not led to an amazingly novel discovery. Instead, through practice, I merely stumbled across what experts in psychology have been studying for close to 100-years — psychology is paramount for high-performance. A 2016 meta-analyses found that psychological interventions have moderate sized benefit on sports performance (Hedges’ g effect sizes = 0.57, 95% confidence interval 0.22 to 0.92). But, be careful, psychology can yield a lightsaber on both sides of the force… A 2022 systematic review of all known meta-analyses of sport psychology and performance found that mood disturbances like anxiety, tension, and depression, and having an egocentric motivational climate have small negative effects on performance (effect sizes: Cohen’s d = -0.2 to -0.5). Meanwhile, many tools help improve performance: emotional intelligence, goal setting, and self-talk (small beneficial effect sizes: d = +0.2 to +0.5); visualisation and imagery (moderate beneficial effect sizes: d = +0.5 to +0.8); task cohesion (i.e. how attracted you are to the task) and self-efficacy aka belief (large beneficial effect sizes: d = +0.82 and +1.0, respectively); and mindfulness (very large effect size: d = +1.35)...
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So, what are these Jedi “mind tricks” that maintain motivation?
Target the race.
Lacking an achievement incentive can impair endurance performance while motivated folks tend to place higher value on a performance goal. Therefore, raising the level of importance of a race might help motivate you to push through the wave of discomfort (the increasing effort required to maintain the same speed) during a race. By targeting an event and focussing your training and life towards that race day, it will become important… it will become fuel for your motivational fire. So, rather than just grinding through a weekly Parkrun, why not pick one a month and spend those interim weeks focussing towards that one end-of-the-month race? Or, instead of entering everything you can find on the race calendar, why not pick some main targets (“A” races) for the year? Make them important. Motivate your journey towards them and fuel your motivation to push harder-than-usual on those 3 occasions.
Engineer your enjoyment of the race. Your enjoyment of the effort — how good or bad the effort feels — can influence your choice to slow down. Make training fun. Use situational exposure to help you thrive off the presence of others (e.g. train with and race against folks ever-so-slightly faster than you. Pick events that sound like you’ll enjoy them. Pick events that play to your strengths. Pick events where you will need to overcome a challenge. Enjoying a race and enjoying the effort during such a race will motivate you to push through the wave of discomfort. Furthermore, a study of 1200 endurance athletes found that folks with a high level of satisfaction from their sport were eight-times more likely to have “high mental toughness” (odds ratio = 8.17; 95% confidence interval 5.63 to 11.87; P<0.001). I.e., doing what you enjoy might make you tougher at persisting through uncontrollable race day situations.
Use motivational self-talk. While talking to yourself is a classic sign of schizophrenia, catching an athlete muttering to themself is probably that athlete telling themself they are going to beat you. Beat them at their own game by saying thing like: “You can tolerate this”, “You can keep going”, “You are strong”, “You can unleash the beast now”, “You have a phenomenal beard”, and so on.
Self-talk is like having a coach inside your head — it can provide visual cues but the cues must be short, vivid, and informative. One of my favourite cues when instructing athletes to sprint, is to say “Be like Bolt”; my favourite cue for trail running is “Be Bruce Lee; flow like water.”; and for descending mountains: “Be a chess player; one step ahead.”. Motivational self-talk is a useful tool; evidence supported by systematic reviews (see here, here, & here) and meta-analyses showing a moderate effect of self-talk on sport performance (effect size = 0.48, 95% CI 0.38 to 0.58).
Believe in yourself. Josh Kerr, 1500m bronze medalist at Tokyo 20201, recently said “if you don't believe in yourself, who will?”. I love that. You’ve gotta take responsibility. Belief is a powerful tool and harnessing its effect doesn’t have to involve any trickery. In the Matrix, while trying to unlock the potential of Neo’s mind, Morpheus said:
Be present, be mindful, stay calm. After an NBA Finals game, when asked how he keeps his head during a game, Giannis Antetokounmpo replied:
Can you control your natural abilities? Nope. Can you control your competitors? Nope. The spectators? Nope. The weather? Nope. But you can acclimate and use cooling strategies. You can control your pacing, your tactics, your training, your nutrition and hydration, etc. And, all these tools you can control will influence the outcome. So, if you have an “A” race coming up, during the week leading into it, know this… Everything is in the bag — you are ready! Tell yourself that. On the day of the race, own your pace, run your race, and be present. Don't think about your training or your next race — be like Fat Boy Slim and focus on being, “right here, right now”.
Use “if-then” plans. Before his fight with Evander Holyfield in ‘96, when asked how he’d deal with Holyfield’s fight plan, Mike Tyson replied “Everyone has a plan 'till they get punched in the mouth.”. Ever the poet. Holyfield eventually won the epic fight but, in the ‘97 rematch, he probably didn’t plan on having his ear bitten off by the barbaric Tyson. “If my ear gets bitten off, then I will… [insert caption].”.
If-then plans (aka implementation intentions) are crucial because adapting to race day change is an important skill for an athlete. During a race, it is highly unlikely Tyson will be there so your ears are safe but what is your plan? Simply ignoring change is not ideal as this can backfire. For example, during a race your effort (RPE) required to maintain the same speed will gradually rise… but, using an if-then strategy can help keep your RPE under control during endurance exercise: “If the task becomes too strenuous for me, then I ignore the strain and tell myself: Keep going!”.
In my experience of racing and coaching, during a race when things go off piste, staying calm (emotional regulation) and implementing your “if then” plan B or plan C on the fly is absolutely critical for keeping Lord Fader away…
Use positive imagery. Seeing images of pain can impair endurance performance, while images of happy faces and “action” words (“go”, “lively”, “energy”) can lower RPE and lengthen time-to-exhaustion. And, systematic reviews generally find favourable effects of mental imagery on strength and endurance performance (see here, here, here, here, & here). So, on race day, avoid sad faces and don’t hang around sad people — surround yourself with happiness and positivity…
And, all of these Jedi “mind tricks” can help you:
Manage the pain. A 2012 systematic review found that athletes have a far superior pain tolerance than nonathletes (large effect size = 0.87). Your regular training might alter pain perception but athletes also have more efficient pain coping strategies than nonathletes (see here and here) suggesting that learned behaviours can improve how you choose to respond to pain. Because pain is a perceived feeling, pain tolerance is about pain management — you’ve gotta ride the wave and either choose to stop or choose to dig deep.
During a race, things will get uncomfortable, pain is inevitable. Don’t ignore it; accept it. Ride the wave and know that you are in control of your response — “suffering is optional”. Ultrarunners who DNF during races are more likely to feel they cannot stand their pain anymore, feel defeated by their pain, and feel an urge to stop because of the pain. To manage pain, its better to be mindful of it, embrace it, and use pain coping strategies like problem solving, on-the-fly goal/expectation adjustments, distraction, or educating yourself that exercise will reduce the experience of pain — words can be a powerful way to trick your mind!
But, what about painkillers?
A 2021 systematic review found that endurance time-to-exhaustion is enhanced when 500 to 1500 mg of paracetamol (aka acetaminophen) is consumed 45 to 60-minutes before exercise. This would suggest that pain impairs performance and that pharmacological pain killing can help. But, the effect size of paracetamol on time-to-exhaustion was trivial (Cohen’s d = 0.14; 95% CI 0.07 to 0.21; P≤0.001) with no effect on time trial performance. Plus, painkillers are drugs; drugs come with risks — always consult your doctor and check out the NSAIDS section of my Recovery Magic Tool for more info. My opinion of using paracetamol for race day performance gains is that it sits in a “Salazar-like” grey area. It is regulated but not prohibited by WADA in or out of competition. You must always check the rules of your governing body, cross-reference drugs at globaldro.com, stay up-to-date with developments on WADA’s prohibited list, and check the rules of your race — for example, UTMB have banned in-competition use of painkillers. So, don’t use pills; use mental skills.
As you can see, there are many motivational strategies. Practice them in training before unleashing them on race day. They might work for you but, of course, they might not. And, if they do work sometimes, they might not work every time.
Engineer your enjoyment of the race. Your enjoyment of the effort — how good or bad the effort feels — can influence your choice to slow down. Make training fun. Use situational exposure to help you thrive off the presence of others (e.g. train with and race against folks ever-so-slightly faster than you. Pick events that sound like you’ll enjoy them. Pick events that play to your strengths. Pick events where you will need to overcome a challenge. Enjoying a race and enjoying the effort during such a race will motivate you to push through the wave of discomfort. Furthermore, a study of 1200 endurance athletes found that folks with a high level of satisfaction from their sport were eight-times more likely to have “high mental toughness” (odds ratio = 8.17; 95% confidence interval 5.63 to 11.87; P<0.001). I.e., doing what you enjoy might make you tougher at persisting through uncontrollable race day situations.
Use motivational self-talk. While talking to yourself is a classic sign of schizophrenia, catching an athlete muttering to themself is probably that athlete telling themself they are going to beat you. Beat them at their own game by saying thing like: “You can tolerate this”, “You can keep going”, “You are strong”, “You can unleash the beast now”, “You have a phenomenal beard”, and so on.
Self-talk is like having a coach inside your head — it can provide visual cues but the cues must be short, vivid, and informative. One of my favourite cues when instructing athletes to sprint, is to say “Be like Bolt”; my favourite cue for trail running is “Be Bruce Lee; flow like water.”; and for descending mountains: “Be a chess player; one step ahead.”. Motivational self-talk is a useful tool; evidence supported by systematic reviews (see here, here, & here) and meta-analyses showing a moderate effect of self-talk on sport performance (effect size = 0.48, 95% CI 0.38 to 0.58).
Believe in yourself. Josh Kerr, 1500m bronze medalist at Tokyo 202
“Do you believe that my being stronger or faster has anything to do with my muscles in this place? You have to let it all go, Neo — fear, doubt, and disbelief — free your mind.”
His point…? Don’t put a ceiling on your performance. To learn by example, Eliud Kipchoge is the epitome of self-belief. He believes in his coach. He believes in his team. He believes in his ability. He believes he is not limited. To instil confidence in your ability and improve your self-belief, use words (self-talk) or actions (workout benchmarks or time trials). Use training approaches (including coaches/advisors) in which (in whom) you believe. Use situational exposure to learn to get comfortable being uncomfortable at race pace and to learn to believe in your abilities. As Yoda, the most powerful Jedi Master of the Fatigue Resistance, once said:
“You fail because you don’t believe.”
Remedy that.
Be present, be mindful, stay calm. After an NBA Finals game, when asked how he keeps his head during a game, Giannis Antetokounmpo replied:
“When you focus on the past, that's your ego.”
“When I focus on the future, it's my pride.”
“I try to focus in the moment, in the present, and that's humility. That's being humble.”
This is powerful. To keep a positive mindset and maintain motivation on race day, be present, be mindful, and think “What can I control?”...
“When I focus on the future, it's my pride.”
“I try to focus in the moment, in the present, and that's humility. That's being humble.”
Can you control your natural abilities? Nope. Can you control your competitors? Nope. The spectators? Nope. The weather? Nope. But you can acclimate and use cooling strategies. You can control your pacing, your tactics, your training, your nutrition and hydration, etc. And, all these tools you can control will influence the outcome. So, if you have an “A” race coming up, during the week leading into it, know this… Everything is in the bag — you are ready! Tell yourself that. On the day of the race, own your pace, run your race, and be present. Don't think about your training or your next race — be like Fat Boy Slim and focus on being, “right here, right now”.
Use “if-then” plans. Before his fight with Evander Holyfield in ‘96, when asked how he’d deal with Holyfield’s fight plan, Mike Tyson replied “Everyone has a plan 'till they get punched in the mouth.”. Ever the poet. Holyfield eventually won the epic fight but, in the ‘97 rematch, he probably didn’t plan on having his ear bitten off by the barbaric Tyson. “If my ear gets bitten off, then I will… [insert caption].”.
If-then plans (aka implementation intentions) are crucial because adapting to race day change is an important skill for an athlete. During a race, it is highly unlikely Tyson will be there so your ears are safe but what is your plan? Simply ignoring change is not ideal as this can backfire. For example, during a race your effort (RPE) required to maintain the same speed will gradually rise… but, using an if-then strategy can help keep your RPE under control during endurance exercise: “If the task becomes too strenuous for me, then I ignore the strain and tell myself: Keep going!”.
In my experience of racing and coaching, during a race when things go off piste, staying calm (emotional regulation) and implementing your “if then” plan B or plan C on the fly is absolutely critical for keeping Lord Fader away…
Use positive imagery. Seeing images of pain can impair endurance performance, while images of happy faces and “action” words (“go”, “lively”, “energy”) can lower RPE and lengthen time-to-exhaustion. And, systematic reviews generally find favourable effects of mental imagery on strength and endurance performance (see here, here, here, here, & here). So, on race day, avoid sad faces and don’t hang around sad people — surround yourself with happiness and positivity…
And, all of these Jedi “mind tricks” can help you:
Manage the pain. A 2012 systematic review found that athletes have a far superior pain tolerance than nonathletes (large effect size = 0.87). Your regular training might alter pain perception but athletes also have more efficient pain coping strategies than nonathletes (see here and here) suggesting that learned behaviours can improve how you choose to respond to pain. Because pain is a perceived feeling, pain tolerance is about pain management — you’ve gotta ride the wave and either choose to stop or choose to dig deep.
During a race, things will get uncomfortable, pain is inevitable. Don’t ignore it; accept it. Ride the wave and know that you are in control of your response — “suffering is optional”. Ultrarunners who DNF during races are more likely to feel they cannot stand their pain anymore, feel defeated by their pain, and feel an urge to stop because of the pain. To manage pain, its better to be mindful of it, embrace it, and use pain coping strategies like problem solving, on-the-fly goal/expectation adjustments, distraction, or educating yourself that exercise will reduce the experience of pain — words can be a powerful way to trick your mind!
But, what about painkillers?
A 2021 systematic review found that endurance time-to-exhaustion is enhanced when 500 to 1500 mg of paracetamol (aka acetaminophen) is consumed 45 to 60-minutes before exercise. This would suggest that pain impairs performance and that pharmacological pain killing can help. But, the effect size of paracetamol on time-to-exhaustion was trivial (Cohen’s d = 0.14; 95% CI 0.07 to 0.21; P≤0.001) with no effect on time trial performance. Plus, painkillers are drugs; drugs come with risks — always consult your doctor and check out the NSAIDS section of my Recovery Magic Tool for more info. My opinion of using paracetamol for race day performance gains is that it sits in a “Salazar-like” grey area. It is regulated but not prohibited by WADA in or out of competition. You must always check the rules of your governing body, cross-reference drugs at globaldro.com, stay up-to-date with developments on WADA’s prohibited list, and check the rules of your race — for example, UTMB have banned in-competition use of painkillers. So, don’t use pills; use mental skills.
Then, there’s caffeine…
Caffeine will help delay a visit from Lord Fader.
Pre-exercise and during-exercise supplementation with caffeine can increase sprint and intermittent exercise performance and can help delay a race-day visit from the Sith Lord of Fatigue during efforts of any duration. Caffeine works not only by improving neuromuscular function (increased muscle force) but also increasing motivation and alertness, while reducing your perception of effort (or RPE).How?
Because caffeine can enter your brain and inhibit adenosine receptors.
Say what? A rise in adenosine levels, which happens during exercise, is proposed to block the release of neurotransmitters like dopamine, resulting in a greater perception of effort (RPE) and a decrease in motivation to keep going (first proposed here, then reviewed here & here). Therefore, caffeine prevents adenosine binding to its receptor thus allowing dopamine to continue being secreted, keeping motivation high, RPE under control, and Lord Fader away. This partly explains why caffeine is such a potent performance enhancer.
(NOTE — coming soon — check out my Sports Supplements Tool to read all about caffeine. Also note that caffeine is regulated but not prohibited by WADA in or out of competition. However, always check the rules of your governing body, stay up-to-date with developments on WADA’s prohibited list, and check the rules of your race.)
Are there other ways to resist fatigue?
Yes, there are a couple of novel approaches that target the brain — brain training and transcranial stimulation.
Brain endurance training might prevent you slowing down.
In 2014, Sam Marcora presented an abstract at ECSS showing 28 physically active males randomised to 12 weeks of aerobic training either performing mentally fatiguing tasks while exercising or not. Both groups had similar improvements in V̇O2max but the “brain training” group had larger improvements in time-to-exhaustion and greater reductions in RPE. The work was discussed in the media (see here & here) and formed the basis for the Brain Endurance Training app but the study was never peer-reviewed and published in a journal (?!). As of 2022, the only published randomised controlled trial of brain endurance training came from old colleagues of mine at the University of Birmingham, who found that concurrent cognitive tasks performed during sessions of handgrip training for 6-weeks, improved handgrip force in nonathletes.So, brain endurance training is a very mentally-fatiguing way to train and nothing is known about its effects in endurance athletes. You’re probably better off investing your time getting your shiz (training, sleeping, eating, resting) in order.
But, what about zapping the brain with electricity?
Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) might keep Lord Fader away.
Once upon a time, you might have seen NBA stars wearing “neuropriming” Halo headphones to get them “ready” for games by delivering a low-voltage current into their cranium.Why would they do that?
There is a region in our brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex that governs inhibitory control. Transcranial direct current stimulation (or tDCS) of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex can improve inhibitory control. Since you know that slowing down during exercise can start in the brain, you might ask, “can you override it?”. Some scientists asked that question and early evidence showed that pre-exercise tDCS might influence exercise performance. But several systematic reviews and meta-analyses now exist (see here, here [correction here], here, & here)…
The evidence shows that while tDCS may have a positive impact on exercise performance the effect is typically small (effect sizes ~0.3) and studies are generally of low quality with evidence of publication bias (i.e. the selective publication of significant results, as shown by funnel plots illustrating that effect sizes for individual studies tend to be larger in studies with lower sample sizes and higher variability). Beneficial effects tend to be found for maximal voluntary contraction and muscular endurance during isometric contractions (prolonged holds to failure) and muscle strength, not endurance performance. While tDCS may have a small beneficial effect on lowering RPE and enhancing low-intensity running and cycling time-to-exhaustion, it does not affect endurance time trial performance or sprint performance.
In reality, very little low current electricity applied to the skull actually reaches the brain. Furthermore, randomly firing electrical pulses into your skull is not effective for anything at all — specific regions need to be activated and this requires the expert hand of a neuroscientist. So, don’t waste your money on “neuropriming” headphones just yet. If wild things like brain endurance training and transcranial electrical stimulation were truly effective, then we’d see world-class endurance athletes using them. That we do not is ample evidence not to bother.
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All these tools in your fatigue resistance toolbox — sleeping, resting, eating, training, acclimating, cooling, motivating, believing, etc — are a bit like the “waste pipe” in Guillaume Millet’s “flush” model of fatigue — RPE gradually increases during a race (due to the accumulation of what I call “fatigue units”) but can be tempered by using Jedi-like fatigue resistance strategies.
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Putting fatigue resistance into practice.
During this series, I dug into how your Jedi brain monitors fatigue during exercise as the sum of Effort (RPE; how easy or hard does it feel?) and Hazard (given how far is left; i.e., what is your expected vs. actual effort?) and Enjoyment (how is the effort affecting you, i.e. how good or bad does the effort feel?) and Motivation (how driven are you to push through the hard effort; how important is the race to you?) and Belief (aka self-efficacy; how much do you believe you can achieve the performance? (see Figure here). After your next race, think about these components of your fatigue monitoring system. You will identify your weaknesses and you can then exploit that knowledge to inform yourself on how to train.Keeping your race day RPE under control will help resist fatigue. Your race effort (RPE) is driven by a combination of the external load (pace/speed) and how well conditioned (physically, psychologically, and emotionally) you are to deal with it.
How do you make the effort at a given pace feel easier? Physiological training (get fitter, faster, stronger) and psychological training (self-talk, imagery, if-then plans)...
How do you influence your enjoyment of the effort? Train with fun people; race against folks ever-so-slightly faster than you; and target events that play to your strengths…
How do you increase your motivation? Psychological training to develop a belief and desire to win; target the event; race to your strengths; make training fun, etc... And,
How do you improve your belief? Use words (self-talk) or actions (workout benchmarks or time trials); use situational exposure (to learn to get comfortable being uncomfortable and to learn to believe in your abilities); and, use training approaches (including coaches/advisors) in which (in whom) you believe.
A practical example of fatigue-in-motion is something often-encountered during a marathon — hitting “the wall”. This is the culmination of everything coming crashing down upon thee… from the physiological (glycogen depletion, hypoglycemia, cardiac fatigue, hyperthermia, dehydration, hyperhydration & hyponatremia, etc), the neuromuscular (strength loss in the knee extensor and plantar flexor muscles, etc), the biomechanical (shifting from mid- to rear-foot strike, less time-in-flight, increased ground contact time, etc) and the perceptual (increased feelings of discomfort and RPE, etc). Everything collides and shiz goes off the rails, and you need a multifaceted approach for delaying the visit from Lord Fader…
How do you influence your enjoyment of the effort? Train with fun people; race against folks ever-so-slightly faster than you; and target events that play to your strengths…
How do you increase your motivation? Psychological training to develop a belief and desire to win; target the event; race to your strengths; make training fun, etc... And,
How do you improve your belief? Use words (self-talk) or actions (workout benchmarks or time trials); use situational exposure (to learn to get comfortable being uncomfortable and to learn to believe in your abilities); and, use training approaches (including coaches/advisors) in which (in whom) you believe.
What can you add to your “fatigue resistance” training toolbox?
Despite the bad shiz that occurs during a visit from Darth Fader, you occasionally need to embrace the dark side for short periods; just don't stay there long. In other words, you need to experience fatigue to train your body and mind to deal with it in the future — “stress, rest, adapt, grow”.Fatigue (slowing down) during exercise comes in many forms — physiological, psychological, and emotional. You need to be physically ready, psychologically competent, and emotionally intelligent. So, to help delay a race day visit from the Sith Lord of Fatigue for as long as possible and become a Jedi of the Fatigue Resistance, use Luke Skyrunner’s Fatigue Resistance checklist:
Train to meet the imposed demands (duration, intensity, & technicality) of your event — use situational exposure to learn to get comfortable being uncomfortable and to learn to believe in your abilities.
Use training approaches (including coaches) in which (in whom) you believe.
Target events that play to your strengths to boost your enjoyment and fuel your motivation.
Acclimate to the expected environmental conditions of your event (heat acclimation, cold acclimation, altitude acclimation).
Leading into your race, minimise muscle fatigue and muscle damage by tapering your training.
Leading into your race, minimise mental fatigue with lots of sleep, rest, and calm time, and by travelling to your races ahead of time.
Start every race adequately hydrated.
If your event is a maximal intensity effort, consider creatine supplementation.
If your event is a short (up to ~10-mins) high-intensity effort, consider sodium bicarbonate and/or beta-alanine supplementation (if you can tolerate them).
If your event is a longer high-intensity effort, consider nitrate supplementation.
During the race, be present, master your pacing strategy, and race smart.
During the race, use self-talk, imagery, & if-then plans to keep motivation high.
During the race, drink to thirst. If the race is long, you typically sweat a lot, and it is hot, consider using sodium.
Start every race with high carbohydrate availability (glycogen load).
If the race is long, consume carb-containing foods during the race to maintain high carbohydrate availability.
If it's hot, keep cool before and during the race, and consider a heat acclimation strategy.
If it's cold, keep warm before and during the race, and consider a cold acclimation strategy.
And,
If you can tolerate it, consider using caffeine before and during the race.
It is logical to eat, sleep, and rest as best you can while training as smart as possible. But being the best you can be on race day is like a game of chess — there are multiple journeys to achieve your goal. And now you can unleash several tools from your toolbox when trying to keep giving it large for as long as possible on race day. Tick every box. Leave no stone unturned.
Use training approaches (including coaches) in which (in whom) you believe.
Target events that play to your strengths to boost your enjoyment and fuel your motivation.
Acclimate to the expected environmental conditions of your event (heat acclimation, cold acclimation, altitude acclimation).
Leading into your race, minimise muscle fatigue and muscle damage by tapering your training.
Leading into your race, minimise mental fatigue with lots of sleep, rest, and calm time, and by travelling to your races ahead of time.
Start every race adequately hydrated.
If your event is a maximal intensity effort, consider creatine supplementation.
If your event is a short (up to ~10-mins) high-intensity effort, consider sodium bicarbonate and/or beta-alanine supplementation (if you can tolerate them).
If your event is a longer high-intensity effort, consider nitrate supplementation.
During the race, be present, master your pacing strategy, and race smart.
During the race, use self-talk, imagery, & if-then plans to keep motivation high.
During the race, drink to thirst. If the race is long, you typically sweat a lot, and it is hot, consider using sodium.
Start every race with high carbohydrate availability (glycogen load).
If the race is long, consume carb-containing foods during the race to maintain high carbohydrate availability.
If it's hot, keep cool before and during the race, and consider a heat acclimation strategy.
If it's cold, keep warm before and during the race, and consider a cold acclimation strategy.
And,
If you can tolerate it, consider using caffeine before and during the race.
That completes your training as a Jedi of the Fatigue Resistance . Until next time, may the force be with you...
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Disclaimer: I occasionally mention brands and products but it is important to know that I am not affiliated with, sponsored by, an ambassador for, or receiving advertisement royalties from any brands. I have conducted biomedical research for which I have received research money from publicly-funded national research councils and medical charities, and also from private companies, including Novo Nordisk Foundation, AstraZeneca, Amylin, A.P. Møller Foundation, and Augustinus Foundation. I’ve also consulted for Boost Treadmills and Gu Energy on their research and innovation grant applications and I’ve provided research and science writing services for Examine — some of my articles contain links to information provided by Examine but I do not receive any royalties or bonuses from those links. These companies had no control over the research design, data analysis, or publication outcomes of my work. Any recommendations I make are, and always will be, based on my own views and opinions shaped by the evidence available. My recommendations have never and will never be influenced by affiliations, sponsorships, advertisement royalties, etc. The information I provide is not medical advice. Before making any changes to your habits of daily living based on any information I provide, always ensure it is safe for you to do so and consult your doctor if you are unsure.
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About the author:
I am Thomas Solomon and I'm passionate about relaying accurate and clear scientific information to the masses to help folks meet their fitness and performance goals. I hold a BSc in Biochemistry and a PhD in Exercise Science and am an ACSM-certified Exercise Physiologist and Personal Trainer, a VDOT-certified Distance running coach, and a Registered Nutritionist. Since 2002, I have conducted biomedical research in exercise and nutrition and have taught and led university courses in exercise physiology, nutrition, biochemistry, and molecular medicine. My work is published in over 80 peer-reviewed medical journal publications and I have delivered more than 50 conference presentations & invited talks at universities and medical societies. I have coached and provided training plans for truck-loads of athletes, have competed at a high level in running, cycling, and obstacle course racing, and continue to run, ride, ski, hike, lift, and climb as much as my ageing body will allow. To stay on top of scientific developments, I consult for scientists, participate in journal clubs, peer-review papers for medical journals, and I invest every Friday in reading what new delights have spawned onto PubMed. In my spare time, I hunt for phenomenal mountain views to capture through the lens, boulder problems to solve, and for new craft beers to drink with the goal of sending my gustatory system into a hullabaloo.
Copyright © Thomas Solomon. All rights reserved.
I am Thomas Solomon and I'm passionate about relaying accurate and clear scientific information to the masses to help folks meet their fitness and performance goals. I hold a BSc in Biochemistry and a PhD in Exercise Science and am an ACSM-certified Exercise Physiologist and Personal Trainer, a VDOT-certified Distance running coach, and a Registered Nutritionist. Since 2002, I have conducted biomedical research in exercise and nutrition and have taught and led university courses in exercise physiology, nutrition, biochemistry, and molecular medicine. My work is published in over 80 peer-reviewed medical journal publications and I have delivered more than 50 conference presentations & invited talks at universities and medical societies. I have coached and provided training plans for truck-loads of athletes, have competed at a high level in running, cycling, and obstacle course racing, and continue to run, ride, ski, hike, lift, and climb as much as my ageing body will allow. To stay on top of scientific developments, I consult for scientists, participate in journal clubs, peer-review papers for medical journals, and I invest every Friday in reading what new delights have spawned onto PubMed. In my spare time, I hunt for phenomenal mountain views to capture through the lens, boulder problems to solve, and for new craft beers to drink with the goal of sending my gustatory system into a hullabaloo.
Copyright © Thomas Solomon. All rights reserved.