Hello everyone welcome back to Fit Body Happy Joints. My name is Shannon. Today I want to talk about an interesting aspect of your nervous system that can affect your fitness results. Central nervous system fatigue. We'll talk about what it is, why it happens, and how to avoid

it in your workouts. So when it comes to fatigue associated with working out, we often think that the more tired we are, the better, the more

effective the workout. And if you listen to the podcast at all, you know that that's not

necessarily true. But we've been conditioned to believe that if you were exhausted after a workout it's more effective.

The more tired you are, the harder you worked, the better your results.

And when it comes to certain adaptations like endurance or cardiovascular adaptations where we are looking for sub-maximal or

maximal cardiovascular effort this is true right harder can sometimes mean better

when we are looking for those specific

cardiovascular adaptations. But when it comes to muscle growth, avoiding

unnecessary fatigue is actually beneficial and it's the opposite of what we think.

So why is this? This is because

fatigue will affect performance. When it comes to stimulating muscles enough to

drive adaptation and growth, you want to stimulate as much of the muscle as possible,

because you want to stimulate a high degree of motor units. But fatigue can get in the way of

you stimulating as much muscle as possible because you'll have a

false sense of perception of effort.

So this will make you feel really tired if you're experiencing fatigue and it'll give you kind

of a false sense that the workout or the exercise is more effective than it actually is.

So what happens is if you're accumulating all of this unnecessary fatigue,

you'll stop an exercise because you're tired,

because your whole system is tired,

not because you've stimulated the most muscle

...