Training & Nutrition - lactic acid advice needed please.

what can i do to get rid of lactic acid in my legs.
this only comes about when the speed goes up or when i'm climbing.
would compression tights help in any way .

The lactic acid will clear after about 30 minutes. If your legs are sore after riding they might need a day off now and then. If it's muscle soreness you're concerned about that's from damage to the muscles. As fitness improves the soreness will lessen.

If it's the transient ache associated with going hard, the only solution is more riding and increased power.

what can i do to get rid of lactic acid in my legs.
this only comes about when the speed goes up or when i'm climbing.
would compression tights help in any way .

If you want to go faster without being stopped by lactic acid, you need to raise your lactic acid threshold. You do this using correctly designed interval training:

http://www.teamsportscover.com/node/177

You don't have to use a heart rate meter to do this training - you can use "feel" for where you threshold is.

I don't think compression tights would have any effect. AFAIK, they've not been shown to be of any help during exercise, only after as a recovery aid.

Lactic acid, more properly called lactate, is good. Your body burns lactate for fuel. The problem is when you make it faster than you burn it. You can raise the power at which excessive lactate is generated by doing intervals, although as Merkx said, "It doesn't get easier, you just go faster." There are also intervals designed particularly to increase the speed at which the body clears or burns lactate. Those also help. Over/under intervals are particularly good for this. Many intervals are well described here:
http://nencycling.org/wiki/carmichael_training_systems%3A_glossary_workout_terms

You can also lessen lactate buildup through proper climbing technique:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6QvK1NXINY
Particularly watch Pantani's and Armstrong's heels. Imitate their pedaling, though most of us can't pedal so fast.

thanks a million lads much appreciated.to be honest i'm 57 years old to old i think to start interval training .
i probably cycle around 150 miles a week have done since Christmas so I'm going fairly well on the bike haven't got dropped as yet out of the group. but man do i suffer when the speed goes up .
is there any supplements or vitamins on the market that helps .
again thanks .i shall look at the climbing technique on utube i like that kind of stuff.

thanks a million lads much appreciated.to be honest i'm 57 years old to old i think to start interval training .
i probably cycle around 150 miles a week have done since Christmas so I'm going fairly well on the bike haven't got dropped as yet out of the group. but man do i suffer when the speed goes up .
is there any supplements or vitamins on the market that helps .
again thanks .i shall look at the climbing technique on utube i like that kind of stuff.

You'd certainly want medical advice before starting intervals at 57.

No, there are no vitamins that will make you ride faster by changing your lactic acid metabolism. Stay well hydrated while riding, have a drink of something like milk with a shot of chocolate syrup when you finish - that's it. The rest is training.

57 is not "too old" to do intensive training. There's a guy in my racing club who is 73 and trains very seriously. I train with some 55+ guys who ride pretty hard. I don't think you need medical advice unless you think there's something wrong.

If you have only been riding since Christmas then you should just keep riding. Most people improve significantly for the first couple years of serious cycling.

Everyone hurts when the pace goes up. That's the point.

thanks meanwhile guess i had better train a wee bit more .

You are stuck at 150 miles which tells me something. The most probable is that you are too tired which means you are riding at too high an intensity too often. Most master cyclists find it hard to recover from more than three hard rides a week.

My suggestion, if that is the case, is to dial back on frequency of the intensity and increasing the distance if you have time.

Compression garments on the legs can help with venous return of blood to the heart, but they are more used for people confined to a hospital bed for most of the day. They would probably be superfluous for someone riding a bicycle down the road, since the constant contractions of your leg muscles associated with riding are going to do more for venous return of blood to the heart than any compression garments would (I'm assuming that you have a normal, healthy vascular system).

One recommendation would be to ease up on your "spurts" while riding; if you find yourself getting out of breath or your legs feeling very exhausted while riding up a hill, you're probably getting into anaerobic metabolism in your muscles, which is going to produce more lactic acid as a waste product.

thanks a million lads much appreciated.to be honest i'm 57 years old to old i think to start interval training .
i probably cycle around 150 miles a week have done since Christmas so I'm going fairly well on the bike haven't got dropped as yet out of the group. but man do i suffer when the speed goes up .
is there any supplements or vitamins on the market that helps .
again thanks .i shall look at the climbing technique on utube i like that kind of stuff.Too old? Ha! I'm 65 and I still do them. I have friends in their 70's who still do intervals. You're doing them already, or you wouldn't be suffering. It's just a matter of a little training. It sounds like you don't have a heart rate monitor (HRM). You really need one to do intervals. Doesn't have to be fancy. Simple HRMs are fine:
http://www.heartratemonitorsusa.com/polar-ft1.html

There are no supplements that really help.

Generally your muscles generate energy by respiration. Respiration is burning fuel. Burning is combining the fuel with oxygen producing the end products of water and carbon dioxide. Respiration is done in the mitochondria of the cells. The problem is that your muscle cells have a limit on how much energy can be produced by respiration. The limiting factors are believed to be either the supply of oxygen from the blood. To increase oxygen delivery to the muscles, your heart beats faster and deeper. Also, it is believed that training will increase the blood supply to the muscles. The other way is for the muscles to increase the number of mitochondria they have in their cells.

But if you push yourself hard enough, which is the whole idea of intervals, your muscles will demand more energy than respiration can produce. The cells have another pathway which is glycolysis to produce energy. The cells can produce about 100 times the energy in glycolysis than respirartion. However, glycolysis produces prodigious amounts of carbon dioxide and lactic acid. At full bore, you can only do about 10 seconds of anaerobic respiration (numbers on this vary).

Now some people believe that sore muscles are the result of lactate buildup in the muscles. Other people believe that muscle soreness is the result of small tears in the muscle under extreme exertion.

Compression tights would probably only help if you had really bad varicose veins.

thanks everyone so i won't be buying compression tights.
ah well a bit more training is called for i suppose ,roll on the summer.

Now some people believe that sore muscles are

1. the result of lactate buildup in the muscles. Other people believe that muscle soreness is the result of

2. small tears in the muscle under extreme exertion.



The second is the cause of Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness. This occurs a day or two after training, and is generally a sign of over-training or poor cool-down. We're definitely talking 1.

But if you push yourself hard enough, which is the whole idea of intervals, your muscles will demand more energy than respiration can produce. The cells have another pathway which is glycolysis to produce energy. The cells can produce about 100 times the energy in glycolysis than respirartion. However, glycolysis produces prodigious amounts of carbon dioxide and lactic acid. At full bore, you can only do about 10 seconds of anaerobic respiration (numbers on this vary).

Just to clarify a bit. You muscles require ATP as an energy source for contraction to occur. ATP is produced from glucose. The first step of glucose metabolism is a process known as glycolysis. Glycolysis turns glucose into pyruvate and generates a net 2 ATP per molecule of glucose. In aerobic conditions, the next step occurs in the mitochondria and is the Krebs Cycle + Oxidative Phosphorylation, which uses oxygen to drive the oxidation to drive the oxidation of pyruvate. Generally this second step of aerobic respiration produces far more (roughly 15 times) ATP than glycolysis alone. However during hard physical activity, oxygen is limited so the driving oxidative potential does not exist for the second step to occur. Therefore the predominant pathway used to produce ATP in anaerobic conditions is glycolysis.

The problem with glycolysis is that it reduces another molecules called NAD+ to NADH. Because NAD+ is available in small quantities compared to glucose, the extent of the pathway is limited to the amount of available NAD+ in the cell. Normally NAD+ is regenerated from the second step during electron transport. However b/c the second step doesn't occur in anaerobic environments another method is needed to regenerate NAD+ to allow glycolysis to continue. This method is called lactic acid fermentation. Essentially pyruvate is converted to lactate while NADH is converted to NAD+. The problem however is that lactate is acidic and thus the buildup during anaerobic exercise causes a "burning" sensation. Excessive lactate buildup in the muscle can alter the pH and damage muscle tissue, as such muscle contraction is inhibited by lactate (don't remember the mechanism). In order to prevent lactate build up, when muscles contract that expel lactate into the blood stream such that it is carried to the heart and liver. In these organs lactate is converted back to pyruvate and enters the normal second aerobic respiration step. However muscles can normally produce more lactate than they are able to expel, leading to an eventual buildup. Your lactate threshold occurs then when your heart and liver (and other aerobic organs) cannot metabolize lactate as fast as it is produced, leading to a net accumulation of lactate in the blood and muscle tissue.

Compression tights may help with expelling lactate from the muscle into the blood. However as other have already said, muscle contraction is capable of doing the same (at the very least compression tights shouldn't hurt). What you should probably concentrate on is increased training, which I suspect helps because it might upregulate the capacity of the second aerobic respiration pathway to handle lactate buildup and metabolism.

You are stuck at 150 miles which tells me something. The most probable is that you are too tired which means you are riding at too high an intensity too often. Most master cyclists find it hard to recover from more than three hard rides a week.

My suggestion, if that is the case, is to dial back on frequency of the intensity and increasing the distance if you have time.

The guy is complaining about a lack of top speed and hill climbing power, so your advice is almost exactly wrong. You build climbing power by doing low mileage but fast hill repeats. You do put plenty of rest between them though - rest being time off the bike or slow rides on the flat. Doing this will increase your muscle's ability to turn lactic acid back into fuel.

Just to clarify a bit...

The science there is almost right, but not quite. Despite common usage, there is no lactic acid in the human body! So it can't be expelled from muscle by compression tights:

http://triathlete-europe.competitor.com/2010/02/11/debunking-myths-lactic-acid/

And, yes, I say lactic acid and lactic acid threshold just like everyone else! It's a hard habit to break. The difference only matters when you get to something like tights that are supposed to remove something that doesn't exist.

(Also, I feel stupid when I use "lactate" as a noun - it seems like the verb related to breastfeeding to me..)

The guy is complaining about a lack of top speed and hill climbing power, so your advice is almost exactly wrong. You build climbing power by doing low mileage but fast hill repeats. You do put plenty of rest between them though - rest being time off the bike or slow rides on the flat. Doing this will increase your muscle's ability to turn lactic acid back into fuel.

The guy has been stuck at 150 miles since Christmas. He has not increased his volume since then. He either does not have time or is too tired. We can't help him with his lack of time but if he cannot recover he needs to dial it back and start over with a proper perioditization schedule.

The science there is almost right, but not quite. Despite common usage, there is no lactic acid in the human body! So it can't be expelled from muscle by compression tights:

I never claimed that lactic acid was being produced or existed in muscle cells (or the human body for that matter). And whether you want to call it lactic acid or lactate, the difference being the protonation state, it is expelled from muscle tissue during contraction.

That being said, very interesting link on the new research being done to challenge the traditional view of lactic acid fermentation. A quick review of glycolysis does seems to suggest that as a net glycolysis + lactic acid fermentation does seems to actually reduce the proton concentration in a cell, thus helping to prevent acidosis based inhibition of muscles. That being said, the high consumption of ATP during anaerobic exercise does release a lot of protons, such that when factored in you still get a decrease in pH. In addition we know that pH inhibits the enzyme phosphofructokinase1 in glycolysis, thus the you get an activity based feed-back inhibition to prevent perhaps damaging levels of acid accumulation.

It seems then regardless if you think whether lactate is good or bad for muscle contraction, we can conclude that the expelling of lactate into the blood stream is at least good for metabolic reasons, and that compression tights are probably not needed for the expulsion to occur. However, this decouples lactate from the acid-based muscle fatigue problem the OP is encountering. Perhaps the best way is to do so is through training? How to do so is beyond me though...

I never claimed that lactic acid was being produced or existed in muscle cells (or the human body for that matter).


Ahem:



This method is called lactic acid fermentation... The problem however is that lactate is acidic


So you called it lactate, and think its acidic (it's not) and you don't call it lactic acid? Even though you think it takes part in "lactic acid fermentation"???

Ok....



And whether you want to call it lactic acid or lactate, the difference being the protonation state, it is expelled from muscle tissue during contraction.


It's *produced* by the cell. I would not say "expelled". It can be cycled through the liver if too much is produced for the muscle cell to re-use by itself.



That being said, very interesting link on the new research being done to challenge the traditional view of lactic acid fermentation. A quick review of glycolysis does seems to suggest that as a net glycolysis + lactic acid fermentation does seems to actually reduce the proton concentration in a cell, thus helping to prevent acidosis based inhibition of muscles.


The article actually says that lactate is not an acid, that it reduces acidity when metabolized in the cell, and that acidity in the cell is caused by quite another process....

The guy has been stuck at 150 miles since Christmas. He has not increased his volume since then. He either does not have time or is too tired. We can't help him with his lack of time but if he cannot recover he needs to dial it back and start over with a proper perioditization schedule.

Perhaps so. But today he is asking about hill climbing power and speed.

And the idea that doing high mileage is the only way to train for high mileage died years ago:

http://www.ultracycling.com/training/intensity_training.html

- Yes, intervals (of the correct design) are the best way to train for RAAM, let alone a piddling 150 miles.

I stand correct on the first. Lactate is the conjugate base of lactic acid. The issue is that lactate/lactic acid has a pKa is considered acidic. I happened to confuse the core compound being acidic, with lactate being an acid. In fact lactate does reduce the 'free' proton concentration.


It's *produced* by the cell. I would not say "expelled". It can be cycled through the liver if too much is produced for the muscle cell to re-use by itself.

Question of semantics. I would say that it's produced in the cell. And then is expelled. Whether lactate is retained to an extent does not matter as we know that at least some lactate will be expelled by the act of muscle contraction.


The article actually says that lactate is not an acid, that it reduces acidity when metabolized in the cell, and that acidity in the cell is caused by quite another process....

Maybe you don't quite understand chemistry here, but I'm agreeing with the article in saying that 1) lactate is not an acid, 2) that lactate production reduces acidity, and 3) that acidity is caused by another source (notably ATP hydrolysis to power muscle contraction).

That being said, your statement about lactate reducing acidity when metabolized is false. The metabolism of lactate requires the formation of pyruvate which can then feed into either gluconeogenesis or the Krebs cycle. If your claim is that pyruvate --> lactate decreases cytosolic proton concentration then the reverse reaction of lactate --> pyruvate has to increase cytosolic proton concentration.

lads lads this is way to technical for me keep it simple as the man said.
in the meantime i will try and up my mileage when time allows .
thanks anyway .

Stretch if you get lactic acid when riding up hills don't walk up that increases the acid stop, stretch when you feel ready ride again just pace you're self.

Question of semantics. I would say that it's produced in the cell. And then is expelled. Whether lactate is retained to an extent does not matter as we know that at least some lactate will be expelled by the act of muscle contraction.


Ok: you don't what the word "semantics" means. It's "meaning". Saying that we are arguing about meaning as a way of implying that the disagreement is minor is silly!




Maybe you don't quite understand chemistry here, but I'm agreeing with the article in saying that 1) lactate is not an acid, 2) that lactate production reduces acidity, and 3) that acidity is caused by another source (notably ATP hydrolysis to power muscle contraction).


I understand the chemistry perfectly, but what you wrote was incoherent and self-contradicting. You claimed to agree with the article but also wrote stuff that disagreed with it - you simply didn't understand what you read!



That being said, your statement about lactate reducing acidity when metabolized is false.

Then again, you disagree with the article. Read it.