PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Sport Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1616171
This article is part of the Research TopicThe Cognitive Era in Sports Performance: Mental Fatigue, Cognitive Training, Sleep and Psychological Ergogenic Substances-Volume IIView all 5 articles
Brain endurance training as a strategy for reducing mental fatigue
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Poitiers, Poitiers, Poitou-Charentes, France
- 2Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany
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Mental fatigue is a psychobiological state triggered by sustained mental effort, affecting subjective parameters, performance, and physiological responses. It impairs sports performance across various disciplines. Individual differences in mental fatiguability and physical fitness may moderate the effects of mental fatigue. Initial evidence suggests that endurance athletes are more resilient to the decrease in the capacity and/or willingness to deploy mental effort induced by mental fatigue, though the results are mixed. Brain Endurance Training (BET) aims to enhance resistance to mental fatigue by combining cognitive and physical training. BET typically uses dual-task designs (simultaneous mental and physical effort), which appear more effective than sequential-task designs. Cognitive tasks involved in BET often target executive functions, like sustained attention and inhibitory control. While BET consistently improves endurance performance, its effects on subjective mental fatigue are less conclusive, which offers intriguing possibilities for future research. Other outcomes, such as perceived exertion and brain oxygenation, suggest BET reduces the cognitive cost of mental and physical effort. BET may also influence brain networks related to attention and self-regulation, particularly the salience network, default mode network (DMN), and frontoparietal network (FPN). Functional connectivity studies hint that BET could lead to beneficial changes in how these networks interact, potentially reducing DMN activity and enhancing control by task-positive networks. Although evidence is still emerging, early findings support BET as a promising intervention to reduce the likelihood of getting mentally fatigued and improve endurance performance in cognitively demanding contexts. Future research should refine BET protocols and explore its neural mechanisms.
Keywords: default-mode Network, executive functions, fatigability, functional connectivity, mental effort, salience network, Sports performance, willpower
Received: 22 Apr 2025; Accepted: 29 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 André, Audiffren and Englert. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Chris Englert, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany
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