Post-Covid Fatigue Might Be The New “Life Stress”
Athletes know what fatigue is. We seem to have an intrinsically built antenna for sensing how we feel before and after a workout.
But ask anyone to give a short elevator speech explanation of fatigue, and even the mighty coach will wince.
Western sports science came up with a simple mathematical relation from the so-called impulse-response model :
Form = Fitness — Fatigue
This black-box idea of “fatigue” looks even simpler than applying Einstein’s E = Mc², as everything is nicely linear here, calculable and attributable to one thing — exercise activity.
But whereas E= Mc² has an accuracy of four-tenths of 1 part in 1 million, the reductionist models of fatigue are “fuzzy” at best — working sometimes, failing at other times. That’s perhaps why the best ways to measure fatigue we have managed to come up with is limited to 1–10 or 1–20 number scales.
The attributable causes of fatigue are especially relevant in these viral times. New studies reveal that people suffer from a “fatigue” post-Covid, and people report fatigue even after several weeks post infection. I heard one athlete say to me recently “I feel more fatigued now than before illness”. This is not something you can just “sleep off”.
Theories suggest mitochondrial dysfunction maybe to blame, but if a virus can tamper with the energy production mechanism of the cell long after illness, it has to be proven. Though there’s very little research done in this area, it makes sense that the body might still be responding many weeks after illness.
Dr. Samuele Marcora’s theory of mental fatigue suggests it is a psychobiological state caused by prolonged periods of demanding cognitive activity, which impairs physical performance. That’s another attractive idea. Unfortunately, mainstream “brainless” models of exercise physiology have often ignored the mental aspects. We cannot expect the status quo to shift.
Here’s the deal. No one truly knows all the underlying causes for fatigue. And I suspect this new class of Covid-fatigue will just be clubbed into the fuzzy term “life stress”, as if an annoying side-fact should be drowned out in the seas of the unexplainable.
Fatigue is real. It’s imperative that the antenna we have for fatigue or life stress must be raised several inches higher in these trying times.
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