PERCEPTION OF EFFORT AND MENTAL FATIGUE IN SPORT: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW

Abstract

Mental fatigue has been the subject of several studies, as presented in the systematic review by Custsem et al. (2017). One piece of evidence in these studies is that mental fatigue increases the perceived effort during the task. Several mechanisms have been presented to explain this effect, both physiological and biological. Other evidence confirmed the existence of mental and biological adaptation strategies, expanding the chances of interference from mental fatigue in performance. This evidence interferes with both individual and collective modalities of athletes. This work proposes to compare, in research conducted after 2017, the effects of mental fatigue on athletes’ perceived exertion in individual (cycling) and collective (soccer) sports. We searched the Web of Science Core Collection and CAPES journals and, through a systematic review, identified relationships in athletes’ responses across two sports. Some studies have indicated that mental fatigue increases the perceived effort of the activity performed in both modalities, with cycling resulting in a reduction in critical power. With this, a shorter distance covered at the end of the tests, and in football, influences the total distance covered by the athlete during the test, and a reduction in technical accuracy (mainly of the pass). In this sense, we suggest that new studies be conducted across modalities, examining the technical performance of individual sports athletes under mental fatigue and the ability to reinforce reward during maximum tests in team sports athletes.