Fatigue induces long lasting detrimental changes in motor skill learning

Abstract
Data availability
Article and author information
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Abstract

Fatigue due to physical exertion is a ubiquitous phenomenon in everyday life and especially common in a range of neurological diseases. While the effect of fatigue on limiting skill execution are well known, its influence on learning new skills is unclear. This is of particular interest as it is common practice to train athletes, musicians or perform rehabilitation exercises up to and beyond a point of fatigue. In a series of experiments, we describe how muscle fatigue, defined as degradation of maximum force after exertion, impairs motor skill learning beyond its effects on task execution. The negative effects on learning are evidenced by impaired task acquisition on subsequent practice days even in the absence of fatigue. Further, we found that this effect is in part mediated centrally and can be alleviated by altering motor cortex function. Thus, the common practice of training while, or beyond, fatigue levels should be carefully reconsidered, since this affects overall long-term skill learning.

Data availability

The full data-set of this study is available at (https://osf.io/ypxfg/).

The following data sets were generated

1. Branscheidt M
(2018) Motor learning under fatigue
Open Science Framework, ypxfg.

https://osf.io/ypxfg/

Article and author information

Author details

Meret Branscheidt

The Human Brain Physiology and Stimulation Laboratory, Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, United States

For correspondence
mbransc1@jhmi.edu

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-4008-6916
Panagiotis Kassavetis

The Human Brain Physiology and Stimulation Laboratory, Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Manuel Anaya

The Human Brain Physiology and Stimulation Laboratory, Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Davis Rogers

The Human Brain Physiology and Stimulation Laboratory, Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Han Debra Huang

The Human Brain Physiology and Stimulation Laboratory, Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Martin A Lindquist

Department of Biostatistics, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Pablo Celnik

The Human Brain Physiology and Stimulation Laboratory, Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, United States

For correspondence
pcelnik@jhmi.edu

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

Funding

The authors declare that there was no funding for this work

Ethics

Human subjects: The experiments were approved by the respective ethics boards at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Institutional Review Board and the North West London Research Ethics Committee in accordance to the Declaration of Helsinki, and written informed consent was obtained from all participants (ethics board number 00077792).

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.