Originally Posted by
Harold74
As a type 2 diabetic, I'm very concerned with insulin resistance and am trying to utilize mitochondrial improvement to help rectify that. I find it frustrating trying to suss out just how I should optimally train for that however. I definitely want to improve mitochondrial capacity. And I'd have to assume that mitochondrial function would help as well. But is lactate utilization important to me? I've not run into anything that explicitly says that it would be. At the same time, one of the hallmarks of T2D is high resting lactate levels. Obviously, I don't expect you to be able answer this part definitively unless you possess medical training that I'm unaware of.
Not my specialty, but I do have the medical letters after my name for what it's worth. From the clinical point of view, these distinctions are meaningless. Any aerobic adaptation will improve metabolism in type 2 DM. Elevated resting lactate is just a marker of the underlying aerobic impairment. As you probably realize, this stuff is about coaching strategies and marginal performance gains and has only tenuous support from controlled experiments in humans.
In a meta-analysis of studies of exercise effects on biochemical markers of mitochondriogenesis and function, exercise volume had far more effect on citrate synthase activity (more, better developed mitochondria) than intensity. Interestingly intensity seemed to drive mass-specific oxidative activity (mitochondrial function) selectively, but only at very high interval intensities.
The full text is here:
https://link.springer.com/article/10...279-018-0936-y and the Empirical Cycling podcast recently discussed it.