Have you ever gone all out on an Air Assault Bike for 1 minute? If you have, you will remember feeling as if your body was melting from the inside out. An intense burning feeling in the legs and taste of blood will completely take you over and leave you in a puddle on the floor rolling around like bacon sizzling in a pan. It is TERRIBLE!
This would be an example of an Anaerobic Capacity Test and it feels like absolute shit to go through. Anaerobic Capacity is the maximum rate of energy that can be produced by the anaerobic energy system during highly intense physical activity. It is frequently called VLamax. It can change as athlete goes through the training cycle.
Anaerobic means without oxygen and it is used here to refer to anaerobic energy which means energy produced without oxygen. We have two anaerobic systems as opposed to one aerobic system. The two systems are the Creatine Phosphate system and the Glycolytic system.
We are focusing in on the Glycolytic system in this article. Glycolysis is an anaerobic energy system that produces energy quickly but not as fast as the Creatine
Phosphate system. Energy results from the breakdown of glycogen and is called the glycolytic process. This process produces lactate.
It is not ideal, nor possible, to put your body through this nonsense day in and day out. This is why it is important to train using Anaerobic Power sessions. Anaerobic Power is the percentage of Anaerobic Capacity that can be used during an athletic event.
Various metabolic factors prevent an athlete from using 100% of Anaerobic Capacity for the entire event. For very short events Anaerobic Power will be very close to Anaerobic Capacity. Anaerobic Power is directly affected by Aerobic Capacity, Anaerobic Capacity, buffering, and lactate tolerance (willingness to lay it all on the line and suffer). Something that is super cool is that the higher the Aerobic Capacity of the athlete, the higher Anaerobic Power will be, as the aerobic system eliminates the lactate produced.
Elimination is the process of removing lactate from the muscle and the blood stream. Lactate is a very dynamic substance. When lactate is produced, it will typically leave the muscle and enter the space between muscle cells where there is a lower concentration of lactate. From there it either enters neighboring muscles or the blood stream. It could end up in another muscle nearby or someplace else in the body.
If lactate is taken up by another muscle it will typically be turned back into pyruvate and be used for aerobic energy. Endurance training increases 1) the enzymes that readily convert lactate to pyruvate and 2) transporters that facilitate the movement of lactate back and forth across the cell membrane.
Lactate can also be used by the heart as a fuel or go to the liver and be turned back into glucose and glycogen. It can move from one part of the body to another quickly. There is even evidence that some lactate turns back into glycogen in the muscles.
This process is also called clearance. The elimination of all lactate above resting levels is often called recovery. When programming this style of workout, the rest time seems excessively long on paper – usually at a work to rest ratio of 10:1 – but not only is it needed to allow these processes to occur, the athlete will be begging for this long rest between efforts just to feel able to produce the same output again. If output continually drops as the session goes on we are no longer effectively training this system and have switched over to the aerobic energy system.
Now hold on to your hats! Your world is about to get flipped upside down. Most athletes associate lactate with the pain or burn from highly intense exercise. This is an inaccurate assumption. When lactate is produced in the muscles, excess hydrogen ions are produced with the lactate. If there is substantial accumulation, the muscles become very acidic from the hydrogen ions. These hydrogen ions cause issues with the contraction of muscles for exercise and interfere with the anaerobic process. Athletes describe a “burning” or a “tightening” of the muscles as performance disintegrates. Most of these hydrogen ions originate with the lactate. Thus, lactate itself isn’t the cause of muscle fatigue. But it is directly related to acidity, which is thought to be a major cause of muscle fatigue.
When lactate leaves the muscle cell, hydrogen ions leave the cell with the lactate. So one of the keys to success in athletic events is to accelerate the movement of lactate out of the muscles where it was produced and shuttle it to another location which can use it for energy, convert it back to glycogen, or just temporarily store it. When this is done the hydrogen ions are shuttled too and the problems they cause are reduced. While athletes hate this burning sensation, it is really a defence mechanism against muscle damage. Too much acidity can break down muscle fiber. There is speculation that one of the causes of over-training is too much training at paces (intensity) that produce high acid levels. This training methodology must be carefully prescribed and the athlete and the coach must monitor recovery – this is a massive issue in some CrossFit style training environments where this intensity is sometimes worn as a badge of honor without fully understanding the physiology and the intricate mechanisms at work.
It is important to understand the why behind your sessions to improve your awareness and performance!
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