Why Blood Lactate Testing While the Gas Exchange Test is the gold standard for determining your metabolic response to exercise, a simpler and cheaper alternative exists. Blood lactate testing has been a standby for coaches and athletes ever since portable lactate analyzers hit the market. These handheld devices are roughly the size of a blood glucose meter for diabetics and work on similar principles. A tiny, nearly painless blood sample is collected on a test strip, inserted into the meter, and a result appears in 10 to 60 seconds. By gradually increasing exercise intensity and recording heart rate at each…
Author: Steve House
And why I trust it to read your aerobic threshold from the training you’re already doing.
Understanding HRV: What it is and how to measure and improve this key indicator of your health.
Follow this in-depth guide to learn how to perform the heart rate drift test and to learn why it is an essential tool for aerobic self-assessment.
Structured, evidence-based training methods for coaches and self-coached athletes who want clarity on when physiological testing is useful, how to interpret training data, and how to effectively track performance improvements without overly relying on formal lab tests.
Calves burning, hips locked in hard against the ice, one arm locked off low as I swing an ice tool high overhead. I have trained for ice climbing since the first season I discovered it way back in 1988—training that has taken me to some of the wildest places on our planet. Ice and mixed climbing are core skills to alpine climbing, and fun in their own right. Before jumping into ice climbing training (and mixed climbing training), it helps to know what is involved physically. The quintessential ice climbing movement taxes the calf muscles, the shoulder girdle muscles, the triceps,…
Heart Rate Drift Test This test has become our go-to test for all our coached athletes. We like it so much that we include it as the first workout in every aerobically based training plan we offer. This article provides a full description of the test, so we won’t repeat the instructions here. We have found it to be well correlated (95+ percent) with Metabolic Efficiency Tests (the gold standard) Our full discussion of all the self-assessment options is found in this article: Aerobic Self-Assessment for Mountain Athletes Simple in concept, the Heart Rate Drift test uses the principle that when…
Who are you becoming? And have you considered asking yourself, why? Are you the result of a decision or an accident? How good is your relationship with yourself? In the mountains we are all asked to try new things, to learn. Learning is agency distilled into its purest form. Perhaps this is why education has often served as the great equalizer in a meritocracy. Could mountains be the purest form of meritocracy in existence? In the mountains we are learning how we can choose to control one aspect of our life and ourselves. As you deepen your practice in the…
Learn about how mitochondrial adaptations influence lactate metabolism and how endurance athletes can apply these insights to their training.
Read all about the role of mitochondria in aerobic training. By tailoring training and recovery, readers can enhance these biological processes to improve endurance and resilience.