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A good start to the season
It was nearly a month and a half ago that I moved here to northern Maine and began training full time again for biathlon. Training has been going extremely well and I am quite satisfied with my improvements to date. As I have alluded to in the past, I plan my year-round training myself using both the experience that I have developed over the past seven years and that of a large number of coaches and sports scientists, whose ideas on training I value.
There have been a few key things that I have been putting the greatest emphasis on the past few weeks. During the spring, I put in a good deal of base work – long workouts that were at an easy pace, plus a sizeable amount of strength training. So the next step was to start introducing some higher intensity training to start having an impact on my physiology.
For a biathlete, the most important physiological factors, in my opinion, are lactate threshold and aerobic capacity.
Lactate threshold
As I’ve written before, lactate threshold is the point at which lactic acid begins to be produced at a faster rate in the muscles than it is used. It is impossible for anyone to sprint for thirty minutes. What keeps us from going at a faster pace is mainly the fact that our bodies are filling with lactate, which is the blood-borne form of lactic acid. Lactate is an acid, and as such increases the acidity of body fluids. As lactate builds and increases the body’s acidity, muscles perform exponentially slower, until they come to a stop. Therefore, raising the point at which lactic acid builds is important in allowing me to ski at a faster pace.
Aerobic capacity
The second important factor is aerobic capacity, or Vo2-max. Athletes often throw around their Vo2-max numbers because it is an important indicator of aerobic performance. Vo2-max measures a number of things, many of which can be improved through training. In general, it measures an athlete’s ability to consume oxygen. Since oxygen is utilized in the muscles, Vo2-max measures the entire pathway from when an athlete breathes in to when oxygen is used in the muscle and finally to when the athletes breathes out. It includes the efficiency of a number of factors: pulmonary ventilation, blood chemistry, heart physiology, blood flow from the heart to muscles, and finally the metabolism of oxygen in the muscles. Improving these values allows me to perform at a higher maximal rate. All other things being equal, the skier with the highest Vo2-max values will climb a hill the fastest.
Measuring tools for peak performance
Training to improve both my lactate threshold and aerobic capacity are not such opposite goals. Each goal requires separate measuring equipment, however.
When training to specifically improve my lactate threshold in an intensity workout, I am aided by the Arkray Lactate Pro blood lactate machine. With it I am able to pinpoint exactly how much lactate is in my blood. If I go too hard, and my blood lactate value is too high, the entire workout is a failure. If it is too low, then I may not be getting as much of a benefit as possible from the workout.
Athletes often use a machine like the Lactate Pro a few times per year to correlate their blood lactate values with a certain heart rate. Then, they believe they can simply look at their heart rate to determine their blood lactate. This process uses a “lactate profile,” or a graph that plots blood lactate at certain heart rates. I have found that this process, though much more helpful than simply ignoring blood lactate values, can often be inaccurate for the training that I am doing. This is because we hope to improve these values with training. Other additional factors affect the blood lactate-heart rate correlation: terrain, altitude, temperature/humidity, amount of sleep, hydration, and nutrition. The range of values that I have to stay in for my intensity workouts is so small that I use the Lactate Pro in every intensity workout that I do. By doing this, I can adjust for these factors and train at the correct and most beneficial blood lactate value.
While training to specifically increase my aerobic capacity, I utilize my heart rate monitor. It should make sense now that one must measure what exactly one is training. When training my lactate threshold, I measure blood lactate. When training my aerobic capacity, I measure my heart rate. Both are very important tools for an athlete to train correctly, and since skiing demands improvement in both lactate threshold an aerobic capacity, it is essential to understand and measure both.
If you’re interested in learning more about measuring blood lactate, visit the Fact-Canada website, which distributes the Lactate Pro monitor in North America. They are offering a 5 percent discount on all blood lactate monitors and supplies to you if you mention this site.
Peace,
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