, 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

often see round figures quoted in general guides, ranging from 70-90 per cent of MHR. Unfortunately, the reason they’re so vague is that – as we’ve found out – we’re all different.In the early days, you’d have needed a physiological lab test to find

-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

© 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

lifted the lactate threshold running speeds of the Swedish runners by four per cent and trimmed their 10K times by over a minute. In short, work-outs don’t have to be lengthy to be effective.You will need a careful plan for your 45-minute sessions

high sprinting speed and also a high degree of lactate tolerance. You can’t sprint flat out for much over 200m, because the energy comes entirely from anaerobic sources and there’s a limit to how much blood lactate the muscles can stand before