Lactate: the bad the ugly or the real underachiever? by Juerg Feldmann

Part I:

Working in this field for over a quarter of a century I had the pleasure to get inside views on all different ideas and attempts to use lactate in sport and other related fields. We were influenced by the basic works of Fletcher and Hopkins (1907) and finally got the real answer with the Nobel prize of Meyerhofer and Hill. They actually never were able to prove but rather proposed the first part of the aerobic/anaerobic model, which is still the dominant model for many types of training ideas and testing theories.

In short, as lactate was a chemical substance easy to test, lot's of theories started to use lactate as the reason for different "limitations" which took place during exercise. Lactate is and was blamed for:
- Fatigue (what ever this may mean)
- Muscle cramps and Side stitches
- Post exercise muscle soreness
- Oxygen deficit and possibly some more ideas.

Every day and in every TV sport session the journalist and often the retired champion from the particular sport will blame "lactic acid" for the performance drop or some type of reaction we can see on a hard working athlete.

The original thinking was clear:
As soon the oxygen supply was dropping or was getting low the body would, as a negative byproduct, start to produce lactic acid, which then would produce the above possibilities. So as less O2 would be available as more lactic acid the body would produce and the goal of so many different training ideas was to be able to either avoid lactic acid production or at least try to "tolerate" more lactic acid. Even the sport nutritional supplement industry would come up with drinks and supplements, which would avoid or reduce the build up of lactic acid.

In the mean time there are some interesting questions in this direction and it started already in the early 1980's, when we did "lactate testing" at the altitude center in St. Moritz. We had coaches like Dietmar Millonig's brother, who started to use lactate more in a way of assessing trends than the classical very popular way of Mader: 2 and 4 mmol/l lactate as aerobic or anaerobic thresholds.

Other ideas surfaced like Conconi test, and I remember still our first attempt with metronomes and drums to pace the athletes around the field. We developed the first Casio pacers to make it easier and as usual we were sure that was the way to go. Already at that time there were some researchers lonely in the desert asking critical questions but got pushed under the table. Some of these questions are still out there but with some answers and some nice small practical demonstrations:

Muscles are able to release lactate, even without exercising. (Connett et al circa 1984). This was clear as the question that lactate was or may be not only be a part of anaerobic conditions in the muscles, but was getting used by other means.

The same group around Connett and later Gayeski as well as the famous Saltin suggested that there is no proof or evidence, that muscles would go anaerobic during intense exercise and not even in all out workouts. In fact there are researchers out there showing that the O2 situation in an all out working muscles may be actually higher than in a lower intensity.

The next question or discussion was the fact that there is or seems to be no lactic acid in the human body at all, but rather lactate in combination with sodium. Why and where was this "misconception" coming in, for lactate to be the bad guy. Well the main reason was that under a gradual increase of workload there was an increase of lactate to be measured in the system, and in cases where the athletes were really at the end of their "ability" the lactate measured in the system was always very high.

Once the athlete started to feel better the lactate levels normally would drop. So no wonder there was an easy conclusion to make about the influence of lactate to any of the limitation in performance. Now if we would have tested in a graduated step test instead of lactate, blood sugar we may have given the bad name perhaps to this blood sugar.

Now these days the ideas have turned, but are still not fully accepted. Well remember it took the Catholic Church till 2003 before they accepted Galileo Galilei's idea that the world is round and not the center of the universe. So we are doing not too badly in this field, but it will still take some years to come to understand what the major shift (the new paradigm) on lactate will do in the world of coaching and testing. As well as the incredible large number of PhD's which were done under the "old" ideas and conclusions drawn and published out of this research. We as coaches and small field researchers have to rethink and reorganize in a better way, how we set training zones and applications to it as well as "justification" and explanations to certain training ideas like "lactate tolerance training" and so on.

I would like to close this inital part with a summary of questions and "statements" to open a discussion:

Summary:

1. There is no lactiac acid but rather the form of lactate sodium in the body.

2. There is no anaerobic situation in healthy all out working muscles even in the hardest part of the workout or step test.

3. There is no conclusive evidence, which may suggest, that the muscles become anaerobic during hard workouts and that there is therefore something called lactate threshold or anaerobic threshold.

4. There is nothing like a sudden increase in lactate existing much rather a very nice smooth exponential increase. Therefore, there is nothing to find as an anaerobic threshold nor a ventilatory threshold. In fact based on some research from Brooks et al (Berkeley, California) and Dubouchaud, lactate may be produced and used in the muscle as one of the key products and even may be the main reason why we can sustain certain higher intensity exercise thanks to it's existence. Lactate may be one of the most important "fuels" in the body and can be shuttled around to be used in areas which are in high demand of energy.

Conclusion:

If this is all a new direction, then we know, that at the moment when we can measure lactate in the blood and see a trend in lactate accumulation, we know that metabolically there is a heavy demand for Glucose and on the production of ATP as an oxygen dependent energy production. A decline (trend) in lactate in the system will give us the indication that for the moment there is a need for energy but the intensity in which we move is on a level where we can produce this energy demand oxygen dependent but need a very efficient fuel source, which in this case is lactate.

This thinking brought us to the believe, that we should distance ourselves from terminology like lactate threshold, anaerobic threshold and the classical terminologies. So Herb and I decided to name our trend situation we produce with FaCT testing as LBP for Lactate Balance Point. Meaning exactly this: Lactate in balance on any given level, meaning we have no clear trend at that moment in increasing of lactate levels nor decreasing, or at least a very small change as it is a physiological process.

So for us, as we developed and still are developing better ideas of assessing performance changes, we decided that there is only a trend idea working, rather than absolute numbers. With this in mind we had to overcome the fact that we would be the two lonely guys in the north foolish enough to believe that we don't want to work with anaerobic and aerobic but with completely different ideas of zones. To be not too far off the existing world we slowly integrated these ideas in our small concept. Now 15 years later we are surprised that more and more people actually start independently from us to form similar ideas, or like in the case of a German PhD candidate take our idea and simply change the name. The fact that his work was accepted was nice for us, as we see that there is some "truth" behind our crazy ideas.

In Switzerland the idea has a kind of a rebirth with different Centers looking at it, thanks to a PhD candidate with a respected name, who sells it as a new concept. We have one big advantage: thanks to my bad English I produce own names like LBP and so on and it is fun to see this LBP showing up in more and more papers all over and nobody really knows where it comes from. We see people using LBP as the place where the body moves from aerobic to anaerobic.

Here simply what LBP is:

It is the area (not really point) and we may have to change actually LBP perhaps to LBZ (Lactate Balance Zone) where the increase for demand of glucose to cover the energy demand in the muscle is so high that the product lactate can't be utilized in the working muscle and will be released or transported (MCT I idea) into the blood stream to be used in other muscles and organs like heart, liver, respiratory muscles and so on.

The nice thing with this situation is that some researchers believe that in the step of releasing or transporting the lactate out of the "overloaded" area the lactate may as well take an H+ with it and therefore help to try to buffer the increasing acidic situation to survive somewhat longer. So these groups believe that lactate may be the product of, but not the cause of muscle contractions.

In the next few days I will show some basic field tests we did over the last 20 years where we believe they show this idea of a positive lactate and take the old ideas apart. Stay tuned as we will go through a full FaCT test with a very simple language to explain why and how we do the steps and we may use the numbers from Gary as an example of what was going on in his test and how we can use the physiology to run FaCT very simply and anywhere. You will see why at the beginning there is no need for a very specific protocol, but the need to think and react during testing. This alone is very bad because who likes to think during a test and who likes to make a decision to change something during a test?

I remember the look on the person in a University during a test we did with a top Canadian athlete, when we decided during the test at the start that he had to go to the washroom. I said OK we just go back to where we stopped and there is no problem. Ha Ha, and even worse was at the moment where we demanded the ability to prolong the step at the same level for a few more minutes to see the trend better. Ha Ha, there was no way to do that because the programmed computer was just not set for that. I am sure when we left the University they were more than happy that we would go back and disappear into the bush. The only problem was that the information and intensity we got for the athlete from the university were just simply impossible to do, but there are rules and regulations. (Smile) Have fun and stay tuned for some more practical ideas and crazy thoughts.

Juerg

www.fact-canada.com