Does walking with a weighted vest or easy cycling (E-bike so HR does not go above 70% of max) for 1-3 hours (1 hour on workout days, 2-3 hours once a week on restday like sunday for example) induce a lot of central fatigue? My aerobic endurance is decent.
I want to manage weight training and cardio as much as possible because I like doing both.
However, my methylation is bad and I tend to overload my CNS quickly (not just training, too much thinking, thought processing in general, typical type 3 stuff).
I tend to exercise too much because I crave movement in both categories. But I also don’t want to screw up my cognitive performance, which inevitably decreases my performance in the gym as well.
I believe you mentioned somewhere that endurance activities with a repetitive nature create more central fatigue than weight training. I’m assuming that any activity performed with less than 70% of max HR does not fall into this category?
No, it does not. At least I can say it for sure for walking with a weight vest as I do it daily, sometimes twice (45-60 minutes at a time). Walking is not aerobic training, it’s locomotion.
What I mean by that is that the body is extremely efficient at walking and the intensity of effort (or the duration) needs to be very high in this pattern to represent a stress, especially in someone with a decent level of cardiovascular fitness.
A weight vest, by itself (especially considering the way it distributes the weight) is likely not enough to put you in that stress zone (well it depends on the load. I’m talking about the typical 20-30lbs vest).
If you were to do hard hiking in mountains with the vest, then things would be different. But walking down the streets, which are fairly flat, will not cause an issue unless the duration if very long.
How long will cause central fatigue? Hard to say exactly, but a good clue is when things start to hurt. You know what I mean, your feet become sore as you are waking, maybe your hips or knees. So 3 hours is likely to cause a small problem, 2 hours might too … if these are done non-stop. If they are done as 2 - 3 bouts of 1 hour you will likely be fine.
The pain/discomfort signals sent to the brain are one of the main cause of central fatigue. As long as an activity feels comfortable chances are that it will cause very little, if any central fatigue.
The downside though is that you should not expect a significant improvement in aerobic capacity from this (unless you are extremely sedentary to start with). It will have health-promoting effects and an effect on body composition. But not on aerobic capacity, it’s not intense enough.
I thought so already but your practical explanation and attention to detail (e.g. how to recognize central fatigue when performing activities) helps put my mind at ease.
Do you have any material (video, article etc.) on central fatigue? I’m very interested to learn more about this topic.
This is very helpful. 1 hour bouts are indeed more practical, especially on workdays. Every now and then I like to make longer walks on Sundays because I like spending time in nature to clear my busy head. The weighted vest is an added bonus to increase caloric expenditure a little bit.
I’m not doing it for improvements in aerobic capacity, simply for the health benefits, body comp and stress management. I’m saving aerobic capacity for metcon saturdays.