Balance
Since you advise me to change to this thread here I am.
Did i wake up from a nightmare ?
Someone is doing serious questions and doubts about the effectiveness of the lactate threshold theories ? I can´t believe…
And all the threshold followers what they are doing? They simply try to adjust their own past fix threshold concepts to a new emergent new fashion physiologist concepts.
Yesterday (as to say) it was the lactate threshold a kind of salvation and the effective way to improve aerobic condition. Today, it comes someone that doesn´t know nothing relevant about training technique really - Noakes and /or Richard Gibbens – to dismiss all threshold gurus, How is this possible?
Now that´s the intersting part I always mention. Physiologists they don´t agree one with each other. Let them disagree. Yesterday the training was been like it was and today the training that´s the same. The only thing that changes that are physiology knowledge.
ZuZu says : 2) learning to identify physical feedback that signals such laboring is imminent. It so happens that exceeding the lactate threshold is a prelude to the onset of struggling (whether it is the cause of struggling or not). Since blood lactate measurements are now relatively easy to obtain (and can be correlated with heart rate and, in a more subjective sense, with perceived exertion), why not use the lactate threshold as an objective marker for effort intensity?
Correct. Simply what Noakes and others they say recently, Thomas Rowland said since a long ago:
" Since lactic acid is a by-product of anaerobic metabolism, peak levels of blood lactate after short, high intensity exercise have been used as a means of estimating anaerobic fitness. The validity of this approach has been highly suspect because muscle cell lactate is not necessarily in equilibrium with that in the extracellular fluids, and also because blood lactate levels are an expression of clearance and elimination rates as much as muscle production.
Consequently, blood lactate concentrations cannot be assumed to reflect concentrations of muscle lactate.
Paterson and Cunningham used postexercise lactate levels as indicators of "anaerobic capacity" in 10-15 year-old children. In a earlier study the same treadmill protocol, the test-retest coefficient for postexercise lactate levels was only r= .53, with wide intraindividual variability. Measurements of lactate levels during exercise testing of children has therefore not been embraced as a useful means of evaluating anaerobic fitness; lactate values have been used largely to estimate submaximal anaerobic threshold and to identify maximal testing efforts.
Several considerations are important if one uses lactate levels during
exercise testing of children. These have been reviewed by Armstrong and Welsman. Peak blood lactates levels are reached 1-2 min. after a maximal progressive test in children , as compared to 5-7 min. postexercise in adults. Lactate levels may vary according to mode of exercise, test protocol, site of blood sampling, and lactate essay methodology. These factors must be considered when one makes comparisons of lactate levels obtained in different studies"
(I don´t quote more because I don´t want violate copyrights)
Of course that we may still use lactate meters – despite they aren´t accurate but if all “threshold theories” as promoting aerobic condition that goes out as no useful and that goes to the recycle bin.
ZUZu also says that: “Someday the entire notion that there is a "lactate threshold" may be debated or even discarded, but how you feel during that stage of effort between "in control" and "in trouble" will always serve as an effective training barometer.
Rigt ZuZu. But in between the lactate threshold and and running in trouble to the exhaustion you don´t know no useful intensity plateaux that are useful as training formats? I do. If i´m in complete disagreement what Richard Gibbens says (all-out training) I also knows that are effective ways to improve the aerobic condition out of the anaerobic threshold method without get “into trouble”.
One more item to be discussed. Are you sure that dehydration doesn´t affect latic metric tests? Then read what the Russians physiologist they say:
“The dehydration of the athlete during the physical exercise (when the blood samples are collect) determines a false increase of the lactate concentration, that will have to be corrected by the determination of the water deficit calculated for the concomitant determination of the hematocrit.”
I really think that you all, you want to follow the last hype theory, but you may wait. Training for the distance needs well sustain and test concepts, not fashion theories, or the last tests done with rats.