, that dreaded substance that turns your legs into cement blocks. These days, however, respected and reasonable people are saying some nice things about lactic acid, or at least about the lactate that is quickly produced from lactic acid. In a journal article

, the threshold you should be most concerned with is your lactate threshold – the point at which, during exercise of increasing intensity, your blood-lactate level soars.When its energy demands are being met aerobically (with oxygen), your body produces little

Whether you call it tempo running or anaerobic, lactate or ventilatory threshold training doesn’t matter. Threshold training works, and adding it to your schedule is sure to make you faster and more efficient in endurance races.Threshold training

We've already highlighted the difficulties of trying to establish your maximal heart rate. Now you’ve mastered that, here’s another problem: once you’ve found your true maximum, how do you know exactly what heart rates you should be training at? We often see round figures quoted ...

-like-magic method that helped propel Paul Tergat, the former marathon world record holder, to greatness. The secret? The tempo run – that faster-paced session also known as a lactate-threshold, LT or threshold run. One US-based coach championing this method

the point at which your muscle efficiency falls off significantly (your lactate threshold, or LT); and you can improve your endurance, or running economy (RE).It follows that the most effective training takes direct aim at one or more of these three factors

© Getty ImagesIf you feel like you can't run any further once you've hit the 20-mile mark in a marathon – your legs have turned to lead and your mind to mush – you might have started out too fast. Fortunately, there is a simple way around this. A progression run means starting ou...

percentage of VO2max, making them feel easier. When you improve your VO2max you can then increase race pace to match your usual race intensity (the percentage of VO2max). Because lactate-threshold velocity is tightly related to race speeds, improving your

is the enormous variation between individuals, especially in factors such as maximum heart rate (MHR). I assume that you are using the term ‘threshold’ to refer to the lactate accumulation threshold. Using heart rate to control threshold sessions carries two big

Of course, you'll reach a point – physically, psychologically, professionally – where you can't add more weekly mileage or miles to your long run. That's when you'll have to pick up the pace, and running at your lactate threshold is an excellent way to do