The achilles heel of any athlete is fatigue. Whether it's Michael Jordan, Roger Federar, or a child in a youth recreational league, everyone is hindered by exhaustion. In short, muscle fatigue occurs after prolonged use of a specific muscle group. However, it can vary from person to person as each human body is different. In his heyday, Michael Jordan's legs were so accustomed to running up and down the hardwood that he wouldn’t feel tired throughout the game. However, if you or I attempted to mimic Jordan’s usage rate on the basketball court, we would need a timeout after two minutes. How does this all have to relate to brain activity though? Based on the research from Ryo Takahashi in his research paper “Effect of muscle fatigue on brain activity in healthy individuals,” he found that oxgyen-Hemoglobin values in the premotor cortex significantly increased after prolonged muscle usage. He came to this conclusion by using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to determine brain activity through the measure of oxygen-Hb value. He assigned ten healthy male individuals to perform a pinch motion and found that as each participant continued to perform the motion, the median power frequency, the strength of each contraction, decreased. Therefore, the long term importance of this study could be a means to help explain why fatigue is prevalent in patients with stroke.
Below is the original paper
