If you're a competitive athlete or involved in competitive athletics, you'll be familiar with the lactate threshold; the point at which lactate, commonly known as lactic acid, starts to accumulate in the blood. Once your blood starts becoming more acidic, muscle contraction strength decreases, resulting in decreased force production. As an athlete, this could mean slower speed during the last quarter of your 400m, skating slower near the end of your shift, or not being able to complete as many reps on your next set in the gym. You'd be better off if you could avoid all of these, but can you?
"Blood lactate disappearance was faster in trained than untrained subjects during combined active recovery." [1]
Therefore, the body is able to be trained to clear lactate faster. Since training will have an effect on an athlete's ability to clear lactate, strength coaches can have a positive effect on an athlete's performance in their sport. The study raises an interesting question, will passive or active recovery have a greater effect on blood lactate clearance rates?
"Active recovery after strenuous exercise clears accumulated blood lactate faster than passive recovery…maximum clearance occurred at active recovery close to the lactate threshold." [2]
Furthermore, active rest at 80-100% of lactate threshold showed the fasted clearance of 67% of blood lactate and had higher peak clearance rates when compared to working at 40% of lactate threshold. As a strength coach, this tells me that when I give athletes interval sprints in their program, I should advise active recovery during their prescribed rest periods to enable more work to be done at higher percentages of their maximum.
As mentioned previously, the accumulation of lactic acid will begin to lower the blood's pH, decreasing muscle contraction strength. Carnosine acts to buffer the pH of blood, but is formed by two bonded amino acids, l-histidine and beta-alanine, the latter being rate limiting. Ingesting carnosine is inefficient because the body breaks it down, whereas ingesting beta-alanine has been shown to increase muscle carnosine content [3]. Dosing of beta-alanine should be monitored closely as too much will cause parsesthesia (tingling). The general guideline is 10mg/kg of bodyweight a few times per day, but I prefer a more individualized method. Start with 400mg (you do weight more than 40kg don't you?), and each workout, increase by 400mg until you get a tingling sensation. The dose that gave you tingling is 400mg too much, so reduce it back down to the highest dose that did not induce tingling.
For fun, here are a few excerpts from workouts that I have used with clients in the past to produce a metric ton of blood lactate. Ideally, the athlete would have taken their beta alanine prior to these workouts.
Workout 1
A1 Backward sled drag 5x40m 10s rest
A2 Forward sled drag 5x40m 90s rest
Workout 2
A1 Reverse prowler 5x25m 10s
A2 Forward prowler 5x25m 120s
Workout 3
A Prowler suicides, 4 points 5x10m 120s
(sprint 10m, sprint back, sprint 20m, sprint back, 30m, etc)
References
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