Lactate Testing Mistakes: 3 Factors Most Coaches Miss

you're doing lactate tests with triathletes. We are going to talk about three things you likely overlook, didn't think about, or maybe just missed out on. So before we start diving into that, let's remind ourselves what are athletes actually looking for when they come to you to do a performance assessment, to do a lactate testing.

Well, I would argue they're looking for three things. First thing, obviously, some benchmarking. They want to understand did my numbers change?

Did I improve? Did markers, metrics relevant to my performance in triathlon improve so that I'm actually progressing towards my goal? Second question is how should I continue training?

What training training methodologies what should I be doing? And the third thing is which is often overlooked, they want security, they want confirmation, they want ease of mind, peace of mind, basically to have you, the expert, tell them or reassure them, this is a training you should be doing. Now when you try to do this via lactate testing, there might be a few things that you haven't talked about, thought about, or have not incorporated your testing routine.

The three things we're going to talk about here are body composition and therefore it's linked to gender specificity, benchmarking - are we looking at the right benchmarks? And three, are we able to really measure and track progress by training of our athletes? Body composition matters in lactate testing because the lactate concentration is a result of both production and combustion of lactate.

If an athlete gains muscle mass or loses body fat their lactate dilution space changes and therefore the measured concentration changes even without any change in actual performance. The same issue applies with gender since males and females have different body compositions and most lactate threshold concepts were validated only with males. For benchmarking, the conventional lactate curve does not directly reveal carbohydrate or fat combustion rates which are the most important metrics for triathlon performance.

And for tracking progress, a right shift of the lactate curve does not necessarily mean the athlete improved their aerobic capacity. It can happen because VLAmax decreased even if VO2max stayed the same or even declined. The solution is to combine conventional lactate testing with the INSCYD algorithm which deciphers the actual lactate production and combustion from the curve and allows you to calculate VO2max, VLAmax, carbohydrate burn rate and fat combustion rate from a simple incremental lactate test.