If you're rowing, don't think too hard!

[Ombrax]

This is an interesting story:

https://nyti.ms/2h6mHC2

[Cyclingman1]

That was a strange article. Of course, taking on a fairly involved task while rowing is going to diminish performance for both. Duh.

However, thinking that does not directly reference outside forces undoubtedly occurs for all rowers most of the time. Most of it would probably be performance related. How am I doing? How am I feeling? What do I need to do in the next ten seconds, one minute, etc? Hard to see that as a detriment.

[Nick]

Interesting. I find that the only thing that even allows me to row for more than five minutes without becoming so bored I fall off the erg is music. I crank up the ipod and as long as I don't sing along I can concentrate on form and power and row till the cows come home. If I sing along my wife calls 911.

[Dangerscouse]

It reads to me that they tested something that is way above what any rower would be doing in a session and they didn't test the usual thought process / subconscious arguments that we have on a hard and/or long row.

Personally I think a lot when I'm rowing but not to the requirement levels that they tested, and music is also my motivation. Without I don't last long at all

[left coaster]

I've mentioned this before, but there is some preliminary evidence indicating that concurrently training a cognitive task and doing endurance training leads to greater improvements in endurance than endurance training alone. There was an interesting 'time to exhaustion', I think it was at 80% VO2 max, where those who had done both cognitive and endurance training had 50% greater improvement over those who had just done endurance training.

It's emerging that the brain stores glycogen in astrocytes and 'super loads' these astrocytes with glycogen after endurance exercise to exhaustion or hard interval training (a rat study, because you need to kill the animal and immediately freeze the brain to see the changes).

It's not "just mental", endurance training also results in physiological changes to the brain that make it more resistant to exercise demands. I believe we experience this as mental fatigue, but there is a biological reason for it.