Elevate Your Health Colorado Fatigue

It is now just a few weeks before the race, so how are you feeling? This is often the time when many start to feel very tired, and have low energy. With all the training, in addition to everything else in life which does not seem to stop, it would be nice to just train, eat, and rest. Do you feel tired and have low energy? If so, what does that mean?

I am currently in Southern California at the Experimental Biology meeting, and to biologists there is a lot of discussion about energy as it is related to calories: how much and what you are eating and, and how much and how you are burning calories through your training. But I’ll bet if you think how your energy is right now, what you think of is not your “calorie” energy level but rather your “mental energy”. Mental energy is not something that scientists usually think about, but there was a very interesting seminar at this meeting, and this has made me think about what mental energy is, and how understanding it might help understanding yourself and improve your training.

The scientists have tried to define mental energy, and have decided that is can be described as a combination of three areas: 1) The ability to do tasks that require thinking and paying attention, 2) the motivation or desire to accomplish mental and physical tasks, and 3) how often and how much you have feelings of high energy (or, on the other hand, of being tired). There is an overlap between these feelings of low mental energy and other physical things like not getting enough sleep. But perhaps knowing about these areas and going through them when you feel “low mental energy” might help understand yourself better and help you to continue to move forward and improve.

So if you are feeling low energy, try spending a few minutes exploring why. Is it low physical energy; too little sleep (or poor sleep from a condition like sleep apnea), inadequate nutrition, or perhaps another medical condition (like underactive thyroid, depression). If you are doing the best possible on the physical side, then is this low mental energy? Are you having trouble concentrating or paying attention, is your motivation low, and are you feeling tired, bushed, listless, or ineffective? If so, you might have low mental energy.

How can you treat low mental energy? There aren’t consistent studies to show that any specific with diet helps mental energy. Although activity can help with mental energy, there might be a downside to too much activity (perhaps where you are in your training). If this is the case, it might be that for now you need to decide to just live with it, understand why, and know it will get better. One other option, there is consistent evidence that caffeine does help with mental energy, so a visit to your favorite coffee shop might also be in order.

Good luck on your continued training, and perhaps with this new information, you can continue to improve and work through this time in your training and arrive at the race even more prepared, and go in with both high physical and mental energy.