1) If you want to use the terms lactic acid and lactate interchangably be my guest. Personally, I like to be accurate in my viewpoint and discussions on exercise physiology, I'm not going to say "lactic acid" when believe, and the research supports, that lactic acid is never even produced in the body. I also disagree that how you view lactate has no practical implications as far as training.
This is still a semantics argument, the measurement and useful indication being the levels of blood lactate in every case. Having said that, I will concede that how you view lactate is important if it means you are going to make a different decision for the athlete’s training after getting an x blood lactate result.
2) I also disagree, as do many other very well known coaches from around the world in many different sports, that the best approach is to just "increase tolerance to lactic acid" or however you want to look at it if improved performance is your goal. This is really older thinking and newer research and plenty of experience is showing this really to only be the most effective approach in very very short events.
I don’t know who you are disagreeing with here. I never said the best approach is to “just increase tolerance to lactic acid”, it was clearly you who added the “just” part. A primary way to avoid fatigue is increase your anaerobic threshold because you’ll get less lactate production at the same level of effort. This has obviously nothing to do with tolerance to acidosis or the intracellular lactate shuttle or lactate oxidization (or whatever mechanisms are indeed in place), which was our argument in the first place.
More and more, we are understanding importance of the aerobic energy system, even in sports that we used to believe were glycolytic in nature.
The 400m for by the way, turns out to be somewhere between 40-50% aerobic, depending on which research you look at these days. Even a 100m sprint is 15-20% aerobic! You are totally wrong saying such events are "without significant aerobic involvement"
I've got tons of research on this but you can start here:
Energy system contribution during 200- to 1500-m r... [Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2001] - PubMed result
This is a good point and, to be honest, I was unaware of the specific numbers. Having said that, my thoughts are that the key here is not so much the degree of involvement but more so the degree to which it becomes a deciding factor. Simply put, the degree to which aerobic ability correlates with performance. A 100m sprint has been found to be 20-25% aerobic. Do you suggest that the aerobic system can possibly be a limiting/deciding factor in 100m sprints and thus there might be cases where it needs to be a focal point in training? It sounds really counter-intuitive but I would be willing to listen to your case.
But let me just point out that, here again you are taking a quote of mine ("without significant aerobic involvement") out of context and using it to avoid my argument. You are right, I was wrong when I said 400m is without significant aerobic involvement, but my argument wasn’t that, it was: is the aerobic system the limiting factor and does performance correlate with aerobic capacity?
How about this...
"The aerobic/anaerobic energy system contribution (AOD method) to the 400-m event was calculated as 41/59% (male) and 45/55% (female). For the 800-m event, an increased aerobic involvement was noted with a 60/40% (male) and 70/30% (female) respective contribution.
Significant (P < 0.05) negative correlations were noted between race performance and anaerobic energy system involvement (lactate/PCr) for the male 800-m and female 400-m events (r = - 0.77 and - 0.87 respectively). These track running data compare well with previous estimates of the relative energy system contributions to the 400-m and 800-m events. Additionally, the relative importance and speed of interaction of the respective metabolic pathways has implications to training for these events."
This doesn’t have to do with the ability of the oxidative system to metabolize lactate, this has to do with the fact that a higher relative involvement of the anaerobic system, which would indicate a lower anaerobic threshold, would result in greater lactate accumulation (or, if semantics are an issue, greater PH disturbances). It is interesting to note that, apparently, that was not even an issue yet for 400m performance (at least not in men where the duration is shorter by a few seconds and where the amount of FT fibers may be different). So no real disagreement here either.
Energy system contribution to 400-metre and 800-me... [J Sports Sci. 2005] - PubMed result
RESULTS: The relative contribution of the aerobic energy system to the 200-, 400-, 800-, and 1500-m events was 29+/-4, 43+/-1, 66+/-2, and 84+/-1%+/-SD, respectively. The size of the AOD increased with event duration during the 200-, 400-, and 800-m events (30.4+/-2.3, 41.3+/-1.0, and 48.1+/-4.5 mL x kg(-1), respectively), but no further increase was seen in the 1500-m event (47.1+/-3.8 mL x kg(-1)).
The crossover to predominantly aerobic energy system supply occurred between 15 and 30 s for the 400-, 800-, and 1500-m events.
CONCLUSIONS:
These results suggest that the relative contribution of the aerobic energy system during track running events is considerable and greater than traditionally thought
Or HERE for a good review
Valid point, and thanks for pointing my attention towards this research. Does it have to do with the coach reacting differently to the same blood lactate indications?
There are very few sports out there, even ones people used to believe were primarily anaerobic, that do not rely heavily on oxidative metabolism for performance, for a multitude of reasons.
This concept is not some "big leap of faith" it has been demonstrated over and over again over the last several years in the reserach and discussed by various high level coaches all over the world. Even the late Dr. Verkhoshansky, probably the foremost authority on strength and power development in history, discussed this principle he called "anti-glycolytic finality" in his paper on training for the middle distances. He suggested this approach in distances as short as 200m.
I read his paper on middle distance running. I quote: "To realize this principle [i.e. “antiglycolytic” finality] the choice and the organization of loads during the whole process of preparation should be done with the aim to minimize the involvement of the glycolytic mechanism in the energy supplying during the competition distance running." It seems to me he is referring to increasing the AT threshold so there is less lactate production, not to train the aerobic system in order to better metabolize lactate. I never disagreed with this. Am I reading it wrong?
On a note unrelated to our argument, I would be interested to know where does Verkhoshansky suggest this approach for 200m sprinters. I guess it would make some sense, although performance improvement might be too minor to be significant (remember, there was no correlation with the degree of anaerobic involvement in 400m). I would appreciate pointing me to your source.
I would say focusing training primarily to improve glycolytic capacity is only applicable in very short single bout events lasting 30 seconds or less. Other than that, it has limited usefulness because this type of training will reduce mitochondria in the working muscles and in events of greater duration this is not what you want. A much better strategy is to develop a bigger aerobic engine so that anaerobic metabolism can contribute for longer without leading to fatigue.
It is a parallel strategy. Whether it is a much better one or not really depends from the event. Again, didn’t disagree with this.
My experience training top level MMA fighters for the past 7 years also supports what the research shows. I only do very limited amounts of focused glycoltyic work with any fighter who will be fighting 5 minute rounds.
"And even if one were to agree with that (which I clearly don't), you are also saying that, to train the mitochondria's capacity to handle lactate, you need to train aerobically (where they would get zero exposure to lactate, so there would be no reason for such an adaptation)"
I have no idea why in the world you believe that mitochondria don't oxidize lactate as part of aerobic metabolic processes, you're very mistaken here. Lactate production occurs throughout almost all ranges of aerobic energy production, it is just oxidized at the same rate as production and thus there is no net accumulation. The lactate threshold itself is typically defined as accumulation above 4mmol /L, which makes it obvious there is plenty of lactate being oxidized well below that. You need to look more thoroughly at how energy systems work.
Where did I say mitochondria don’t oxidize lactate? I agree that saying “zero exposure in aerobic circumstances” was not correct, I should have said “no major exposure”. Again, you stick to semantics instead of responding to the point, which was that it makes sense for this adaptation to occur when there actually is a significant (comparable to the actual event) amount lactate production going on, otherwise they wouldn’t need to adapt for that function (wouldn’t increase the appropriate enzymes and so on).
