Imagine you’ve just bought your first ever car. You stroll nonchalantly into the dealership, grinning from ear to ear, handing a cheque over with most, if not all of your life savings to pay for a little 2nd hand banger that’s seen it’s fair share of miles. But you don’t care, you finally have the chance to get out on the road and no longer be bound to travelling on two feet. You give it a spin for a couple weeks on a few journeys to work (or if you’re smart enough, college), to get a feel for the steering and get comfortable with the gears.
Then, a couple of your mates ask if you want to go down to the countryside for the weekend. You suggest taking them down with your “new” car to show off how cool you look in the whip!! You get to a bit of open road and decide to really see what you can do with the car. You slam your foot down on the throttle and and glance down on the speedometer as the dial quickly passes 60km/hr. For a moment you feel like your bombing down the road in a Ferrari and no one can stop ya….. BANG!! That vision instantly fades as you hear the engine starting to grind and you come to a shuttering stop. You get out of the car and pop the hood only to see a smoking engine, that you have no idea how to fix.
When it comes to understanding how your body works when doing endurance sports like cycling or running a lot of people are clueless like our unfortunate friend with the 2nd hand banger. We think we can just do a little bit of training at a high intensity and then expect to perform when it comes to race day. It just isn’t going to happen. We’re just going in blind, feeding our ego with really hard non-specific training only for it to come crumbling down when we race. So how do we fix this problem? I don’t know anything about cars, but I do know a thing or two about the physiology of the human body. And here’s your answer: Lactate Profile testing!
This is seen as one of the few gold standard tests for assessing endurance performance and is something which should be used by everyone in endurance sports from weekend warriors to high performance athletes.
So, what is it?
A Lactate Profile test is an exercise test which tracks the levels of a chemical marker in your blood called Lactate. This substance is a byproduct of one of the energy suppliers in our body called the Glycolytic system. As we exercise for long periods or with increasing intensity, the working muscles in our body need more and more energy in order to keep moving. We start breathing harder and harder to try and get more oxygen into our lungs to produce this energy for the muscles. If we exercise for long enough or intensely enough, we will reach a point where our will not be able to keep up with the demand for energy and become fatigued. This is where Lactate comes in!!- at this point, our body isn’t able to turn the lactate into usable energy and thus starts to build up in the blood. As this is happening, the body starts relying on more anaerobic or non-oxygen dependent energy suppliers than aerobic or oxygen-dependent energy suppliers.
How does this show how fit or how good my endurance is?
Lactate values can be graphed against indicators of performance such as running speed, heart rate or power output for cycling to show how efficiently our bodies are making energy to fuel performance. The below graph is a typical example of a Lactate profile test graph.
From a test, the point at which blood lactate starts to increase rapidly or the Lactate Threshold can be calculated . This value can then be used to set training zones, which gives a more accurate way of knowing whether you’re doing a certain session such as an endurance run or cycle at the appropriate intensity. In this way, by knowing the numbers you can get a better understanding of how your body should feel at certain intensities and plan your training with scientific precision. And I guarantee you this not only lead to improvements in fitness, but also substantial climbs in performance.
So, Should I do a test?
Without any hesitation, your answer should be yes. If really want get the most out of your season as an endurance athlete or if your someone who’s looking to improve their fitness and don’t know where to start, this kind of assessment can be very beneficial for you.
Remember the lad with the banged up car? Be cuter than him and find out what makes your own body’s engine thick, so you can maximise the benefits of endurance training and ultimately get on that podium this season or improve your health and fitness.