Mental Fatigue is known to increase subjective feelings of fatigue and to decrease cognitive performance, but its impact on physical performance remains poorly understood. The aim of this chapter was to review the results of 29 studies published between 2009 and April 2018 and focusing on the impact of mental fatigue on sport-related performance.

Overall, the selected papers indicated that MF negatively affects SSPP. Research that assesses brain function, while evaluating the effect of MF on SSPP is essential to create further insight.

Mental fatigue has a negative effect on various sports skills of high-level athletes, including their technical and decision-making skills; however, the impact is greater on offensive skills than that of defensive skills in terms of the role of athletes. Impaired executive functions may be responsible for the negative effects of mental fatigue on skilled performance.

Findings demonstrate that cognitive exertion has a negative effect on subsequent physical performance that is not due to chance and suggest that previous meta-analysis results may have underestimated the overall effect.

The duration and intensity of the physical task appear to be important factors in the decrease in physical performance due to mental fatigue. The most important factor responsible for the negative impact of mental fatigue on endurance performance is a higher perceived exertion.

Mental fatigue impairs accuracy and speed of soccer-specific decision-making. These impairments are not likely related to changes in visual search behaviour.

Mental fatigue impairs short passing accuracy, but not movement speeds during the Loughborough Soccer Passing Test.

Our results suggest that both mental fatigue, and muscle fatigue, significantly impair table tennis performance and therefore coaches should take into account both the physical and mental state of table tennis players to optimize performance.

It seems mental fatigue may not significantly influence sRPE in individual training sessions, but may potentially have a cumulative effect that may affect the sRPE over a training week. This suggests monitoring mental fatigue independently of other training load (TL) measures may be worthwhile for strength and conditioning specialists and sports coaches to manage their athletes and researchers conducting studies into TL and performance.

Mental fatigue had a detrimental influence on the performance of AF specific skills. The findings may have implications for AF players who are required to sustain attention and concentration for prolonged periods before and during matches.

Soccer-specific technical performance was negatively affected by mental fatigue condition only in U18 in the LSPT

Mental fatigue, induced by an app-based Stroop test, negatively affected cricket-relevant performance.

It is concluded form the result that physical activities can enhance the mental fatigue and speed up the fatigue process based on brain activation, functional connection, and complexity. This result differs from the traditional opinion that physical activities have no influence on mental fatigue, and finds that physical activities can increase mental fatigue. This finding helps fatigue management through exercise instruction.

Findings suggest mental fatigue affects exercise decision-making by elevating subjective evaluation of the costs of engaging in exercise as opposed to sedentary alternatives.

The data suggest that mental fatigue state is a key regulator of technical performance of basketball players and that mental fatigue seems to modulate endocrine and autonomic responses.

The mental fatigue induced by sport-based videogame impaired decision-making and altered visual search behaviour in basketball players.

Overall, the findings presented in this review demonstrated that mental fatigue negatively impacts endurance-based running performance as well as soccer passing and shooting skills.

RPE were significantly higher in the mentally fatigued than in the control conditions (p = 0.02) post-MSFT. Mental fatigue impairs aerobic and cognitive performance in active male endurance athletes.

Mental fatigue modified the players’ movement dynamics on the pitch with reference to the quality of tactical actions and covered distance intensity.

Mental Fatigue impairs technical performance (free throws, three-point shots) and cognitive performance (TTF heuristics and decision-making) in basketball.

These findings provide evidence that badminton players have better visuomotor response time than controls. However, they do not seem to be more resistant to the negative effects of mental fatigue on open skill-visuomotor performance.

Results showed that distance in acceleration covered per min, negative passes, passing accuracy, and shot accuracy were likely impaired than control task after a mental fatiguing protocol.

These results challenge the long-standing assumption that muscle fatigue causes exhaustion during high-intensity aerobic exercise, and suggest that exercise tolerance in highly motivated subjects is ultimately limited by perception of effort.

The results indicate a dissociation in the effects of mental fatigue on goal-directed (top–down) and stimulus-driven (bottom–up) attention: mental fatigue results in a reduction in goal-directed attention, leaving subjects performing in a more stimulus-driven fashion.

The impairment in endurance performance observed after the incongruent Stroop task seems to be mediated by the higher perception of effort as predicted by the psychobiological model of endurance performance.

While previous research has examined the impact of cognitive tasks on physical tasks, this is the first study to examine a self-paced physical task, showing that cognitive activity indeed contributes significantly to overall performance. Specifically, cognitive fatigue increased the perception of exertion, leading to lesser performance on the running task.

Mental fatigue impairs intermittent running performance. This negative effect of mental fatigue seems to be mediated by higher perception of effort.

Mental fatigue impairs soccer-specific running, passing, and shooting performance.

Perception of effort being identified as the variable altered by both prior physical exertion and mental exertion, future studies should investigate the underlying mechanisms increasing perception of effort overtime and in presence of fatigue during endurance exercise. Perception of effort should be considered not only as marker of exercise intensity, but also as a factor limiting endurance performance.

Mentally fatigued recreational cyclists showed impaired performance, altered PFC activation and faster increase in RPE during a TT 20km.

Findings support current views that performance of cognitively demanding tasks diminishes central nervous system resources that govern self-regulation of physical tasks requiring maximal voluntary effort.

Cognitively fatigued athletes have decreased time-on-task in bodyweight resistance training exercise tasks.

The present study documents that mental fatigue results in compromised error monitoring.

Mental fatigue affects attention and the ability to use important information to perform efficiently.

Results of this two-part investigation suggest that perception of effort, rather than severe locomotor muscle fatigue or intolerably unpleasant muscle pain, is the cardinal exercise stopper during high-intensity aerobic exercise.

Mental fatigue has an almost certain negative impact on 2000-m kayaking performance in young elite athletes.

We observed increased reaction time and miss rates, delayed NoGo-N2 latency and Go-P3 latency, and decreased NoGo-P3 amplitude, which indicated that mental fatigue may slow down the speed of the inhibition process, delay the evaluation of visual stimuli and reduce the availability of attentional resources. These findings revealed the underlying neurological mechanisms of how mental fatigue impaired response inhibition.

Mental fatigue alters the amount of physical effort people are willing to invest in an exercise workout and follow through with those intentions by doing less work. These are the first results showing people may deliberately adjust their physical effort to cope with mental fatigue.

Cognitive fatigue increased the perception of exertion, leading to lesser performance on the running task.

Manual dexterity and coincidence anticipation were significantly poorer post mental fatigue compared with control.

Mental Fatigue suggests that cyclists were not able to fully expend W′ even though they exercised to volitional exhaustion.

The results suggested that movement was slowed in the presence of mental fatigue, maybe due to proactive changes occurring during the preparatory state of the movement, to preserve task success.

Mental fatigue limits exercise tolerance in humans through higher perception of effort rather than cardiorespiratory and musculoenergetic mechanisms. Future research in this area should investigate the common neurocognitive resources shared by physical and mental activity.

Mental fatigue impairs soccer-specific running, passing, and shooting performance.

Mental fatigue impairs both cognitive performance and subsequent physical performance

Marksmanship judgment performance is significantly reduced when soldiers are mentally fatigued, although shot accuracy is not.