Blood lactate levels

alexjones

Hi,

I have been training pretty hard lately and in a recent session of 5x5mins above my FTP, I found that my muscles were 'burning' or building up in lactate sooner than usual- my power levels were still there however and my HR was usual for the intensity. During warming up and in between intervals my legs felt good and my energy levels high but as soon as I pushed again towards FTP the lactate seemed to accumulate a lot faster than normal.

I had previously put in a 2x20 2 days before and some sprints 1 day before. Am I right in thinking that after some hard training, the general lactate levels in my blood could have been already high prior to the start of the session and this could have been the reason for the faster than usual muscle fatigue?

If I am correct is the best method simply some rest/ below lactate rides to allow the muscles to adapt/ recover again fully and my blood lactate levels return to normal?

Thanks

Herbsman

How do you know it was lactate and not just fatigued/damaged muscles?

Alex_Simmons/RST

BL levels begin to fall a few minutes after ceasing hard/severe/maximal exercise (they can continue to climb for a short while after ceasing effort). The majority of any BL excess is cleared within an hour.

You are most likely experiencing muscle fatigue, not elevated BL. However an inability to execute an intended session could be due to a variety of things (e.g. glycogen depletion, infection, stress, acute fatigue), but threshold tolerance and sprint work in the two days before would make supra threshold efforts quite challenging if you are not used to such a workload and workload pattern.

alexjones

Ok thanks for that Alex.

I am quite used to the workload I was just trying to figure out what was causing the fatigue- perhaps it was more down to Glycogen depletion.

I was thinking along the lines of lactate levels as around a year ago I went for a lactate test- with blood sampling- and I had to re-do the test a couple of weeks later as my resting blood lactate levels were too high to begin with- I hadnt rested enough for the test.

Wrath Rob

So, you did a sprint workout on day 1, then a threshold workout on day 2 and then tried to do a VO2 workout (guessing from 5 min above threshold) on the 3rd day and you're wondering why your legs couldn't complete the workout? You've got to allow your body some time to adapt to the training stress you've imposed on it as it is when you're resting that you actually improve. You might want to think about re-structuring your plan so that you allow yourself some rest either by spreading out the activity with rest days or lower intensity sessions in-between or changing your workouts so that you do more in each session. For example do 45 mins tempo/sweet-spot followed by some VO2 intervals, though this will be dependent on your fitness level.