Critical Power: Modeling The Power-Duration Curve

A Definitive Guide

For something so familiar that everyone has experienced it, fatigue is paradoxically challenging to define. This is partly due to the limits of language and the fact that different fields of science define fatigue differently. But, it’s also due to the complexity of all of the underlying processes that lead to fatigue. For much of the time that ‘fatigue science’ has been a field, the ‘catastrophic’ model of fatigue was used to describe what occurs when an athlete reaches the absolute limit of their physical performance. Proponents of this model assert that the body either runs out of key nutrients or is ‘poisoned’ due to metabolite accumulation in the working skeletal muscles. However, as early as the dawn of the twentieth century, some individuals challenged these assumptions, one such example being Angelo Mosso, who stated, “At first sight [fatigue] might appear an imperfection of our body, is on the contrary one of its most marvelous perfections. The fatigue increases more rapidly …