Control of endurance training
If you do not know your level of physical fitness, it is practically impossible to make a rational training recommendation. Anything is possible, from a completely inadequate and inappropriate training recommendation to a training intensity that is too high and not unproblematic from a health perspective!
At least if you want to exercise for the first time, you should seek advice from a qualified trainer. Be skeptical if they recommend training of any intensity without carrying out any tests. It’s the dose that counts!
In a performance test, e.g. on a bicycle, the heart rate and blood pressure should be measured as the load (watts) increases. It is also advisable to determine the lactate (the formation of lactic acid as an indicator of the strain on the muscles). With these three factors, a fairly good assessment of physical performance is possible.
It goes without saying that patients with known diseases of the cardiovascular system should be presented to a doctor with the request to determine the heart rate up to which the patient may be exercised. It would be excellent if the patient could then also provide the corresponding lactate values, although today this is almost always a wishful thinking on the part of the trainer!
If no lactate values are available, a lactate test should be carried out before training, whereby the upper heart rate recommended by the doctor must not be exceeded under any circumstances! In practice, however, the 2nd lactate threshold is almost always reached well before the maximum heart rate recommended by the doctor is reached. The doctor’s assessment is primarily focused on the heart. However, the performance of muscles that have not been exercised for a long time is usually more reduced than that of the heart! The lactate usually rises well before the maximum heart rate recommended by the doctor is reached.
Planning the load in the lactate test requires the experience of your trainer. Which test do I use, which load levels, how intensively should I load the test person? How do I interpret the values? Exerting a test person up to their maximum capacity may be of interest to a competitive athlete, but has no place in the training planning of a recreational or health athlete. If you carry out a lactate test, then safely exceeding the 2nd lactate threshold should be a clear criterion for ending the exercise. You now know how the test person should be exercised, any further increase in exercise is at least unpleasant for the test person and can be problematic in the case of existing illnesses.
We now know that without an increase in lactate in the blood, the effects of training and the positive effects of sport on health are very limited. On the other hand, high lactate levels are associated with negative effects such as hyperacidity, negative influences on the immune system, an increase in cortisol in the serum, increased muscle breakdown and much more.
Sports scientists speak of regenerative training when the lactate does not increase, up to an increase in lactate of around 1.5 mmol/l above the resting value of basic endurance training. Values above this should be left to competitive athletes, who no longer focus on the health aspects of sport in competition, but on winning!
Performance-based training
The training recommendations should be derived from the results of the performance test. It is usually recommended that the person starting training should reach a certain speed on the treadmill or a certain wattage on the bike.
What happens in the process?
Depending on the duration and frequency of training, the performance of the heart increases. More blood is pumped per heartbeat and therefore more oxygen is supplied to the muscles. However, as our organism is geared towards efficiency, the heart rate decreases with the same performance. At the same time, the performance of the muscles also increases. If the performance is not increased at this point, there is no longer any reason for a lactate increase; the lactate under the constant performance drops back to the initial values! This means that the effectiveness of the training decreases relatively quickly. Despite a great deal of commitment, much less is achieved in the long term than would actually be possible.
Heart rate controlled training
This is the reason for favoring heart rate-controlled training. If you keep your maximum heart rate constant, you can go further in the same amount of time, burn more calories and the training results are clearly higher.
Compared to training at the same power (100 watts) in the diagram above, heart rate-controlled training in this example achieves around 10% more power.
However, it is not only the performance of the heart that improves through training, the muscles are not only offered more oxygen, no, the ability of the muscles to absorb oxygen from the blood and the number and activity of the power plants of the cells, the mitochondria, also clearly increase through training. The muscle can process more oxygen, the increase in lactate occurs later, only at a higher heart rate is the organism informed that it should adapt to a higher load. However, if the positive effects of exercise are related to the increase in lactate, then the training effect will also decrease as a result of training the muscles. A further training stimulus should be set in order to use the time and energy invested as effectively as possible.
Training after the lactate in steady-state
So another lactate test? No: it is completely sufficient to test how high the lactate is when you have trained for about 10 minutes at the recommended heart rate. Then the lactate is in the steady state. If it is 0.5 – 1.5 mmol /l higher than the resting value, you are in the optimum training range and should continue training in this way. Otherwise, the training heart rate should be adjusted accordingly, although this requires a certain amount of experience on the part of the trainer.
