Are Your Muscles or Your Brain Making You Feel Tired After Exercise?

Did you know your muscles can feel exhausted without actually being exhausted? It turns out that your brain is just as important as your muscles when it comes to fatigue, or physical tiredness. You can experience “peripheral” fatigue, which is fatigue originating from the muscles, or you can experience central fatigue, which originates from the brain and central nervous system. By studying both the brain and the muscles, scientists can examine which is causing your fatigue. But how? Do we need to perform brain surgery to get answers? Luckily, special techniques involving stimulation of the nerves and muscles can be used instead! In this article, we illustrate how scientists determine if the tiredness you feel after exercising is caused by central or peripheral fatigue or maybe both. We will also explore the differences between the two.