November 22, 2015

laktaatnummers

Nov 22 2015

Learning to measure Lactate

If you haven’t done so, you should really read this post, me waffling on about the test protocol and other general theoretical preparations. This post is about what actually happened.

The ambient temperature in my rowing basement was 12 degrees C. There was good air flow (door open to outside where it was 3C), and the humidity was quite high.

  • Preparing all the lactate paraphernalia around the erg. I would stab in my right hand, using my dominant left hand, so lancing device and meter on the left, on the little table with the radio. 9 strips (the 8 that I would need plus one reserve) taken out of the little plastic container and prepared on a clean piece of tissue, on the floor on the left. Notebook and pen on the left. I wrote capital letter and underlined instructions on the top of the page: “DRY. WET. DRY. STAB. WIPE. DROP. MEASURE.” On the right hand side, a safe distance from the precious strips, I had a roll of tissues, a wet towel, and my water bottle.
  • 2k warming up at 2:10 – 2:15 pace, then going through a mime version of the test protocol.
  • First 10 minutes @ 160W. I did the protocol a little clumsily, had to stab twice and still got a miniature droplet. The meter said: “Lo”. OK. A little frustrated but as I was already over the two minute break I decided to accept not having a measurement here and move on.
  • Second 10 minutes @ 165W. This time I paid attention to pressing the lancing device hard against my finger and stretching the skin a bit with my thumb. That proved to be more successful. I had enough blood I think. The entire capillary of the strip turned red, like this:lactaat 002.JPG
  • The reading was 0.8 mmol/L. Much lower than expected.
  •  At 170W and 175W I got readings of 1.2 mmol/L. Funnily now blood would come out of the stabs during the row, but new stabs didn’t bleed much. I had to take care to wait and get enough blood. I gradually reduced the time needed to take the measurement to about 90 seconds, 100 seconds including writing down the result in my notebook.
  • I was looking forward to seeing an increased value at 180W, but I was impatient and didn’t get enough blood. The drop was actually just big enough but I slightly misaligned my finger with the strip, smearing blood on the wrong side of it: “Lo”. I decided to take a longer break, prick again and re-measure. Now I got 0.6 mmol/L!
  • Frustrated and thinking I must be doing something wrong, I decided to jump 10 W to 190W. Here, I measured 1.0 mmol/L. Needed to “milk” my finger.
  • Now with two 10 minute intervals to go and two strips left, there was no room for error. I rowed the 7th interval at 205W and the reading was 1.4 mmol/L. Needed some “milking” of the finger to get enough blood.
  • Slightly angry, I rowed the final interval at 248W, so that’s 10 minutes at 6k pace. Did I say I was frustrated? That caused me to push harder than the 210W that was scheduled. I also wanted to provoke the analyzer to show a high value. I got what I was looking for: 4.8 mmol/L.
  • A 1km cooling down and then a shower. After the shower I took another test reading just to check, and measured 1.7 mmol/L. That sounds plausible. This was about 10 minutes after the end of the cooling down.

Here is the row:

laktaattest.jpg


Workout Summary - Nov 22, 2015
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|Watts|SPM-|-HR--|-DPS
--|19433|80:00.0|02:03.5|185.8|22.5|151.0|10.8
Workout Details
#-|EDist|-Etime-|-SPace-|Watts|SPM-|AvgHR|DPS-|Comments
01|02308|10:00.0|02:10.0|159.4|20.7|138.7|11.1|Lactate Lo
02|04644|20:00.0|02:08.4|165.3|20.9|140.3|11.2|Lactate 0.8
03|07009|30:00.0|02:06.9|171.3|20.8|143.3|11.4|Lactate 1.2
04|09391|40:00.0|02:05.9|175.3|21.4|145.7|11.1|Lactate 1.2
05|11796|50:00.0|02:04.7|180.3|22.0|148.3|10.9|Lactate Lo/0.6
06|14251|60:00.0|02:02.2|191.7|22.6|153.2|10.9|Lactate 1.0
07|16760|70:00.0|01:59.6|204.8|24.2|159.9|10.4|Lactate 1.4
08|19433|80:00.0|01:52.2|247.6|27.7|171.1|09.7|Lactate 4.8

laktaatnummers.jpg

So now I have a blue pinky finger and a well perforated ring finger on my right hand, I am a little confused, and I am torn between a few explanations:

  1. I must have done something systematically wrong and got too low numbers. This sounds very plausible as I am just learning to take the measurements. On the other hand, I read on several places that if you do something wrong, you tend to get too high values …
  2. I am an anomaly and very efficient at re-using lactate. I seem to get significantly lower lactate numbers at low power than the crowd on the Free Spirits Forum. Does the 2.0 mmol/L as a good steady state intensity apply to me at all? Have I been doing my steady state at a too low intensity? I use to row around 2:06 pace which is 175W.
  3. Another possibility is that I am seriously overtrained, completely depleted of glycogen and not able to increase the lactate level. Somehow this theory seems in conflict with my recent testing of the 2k and 6k …
  4. I really should have continued and measured at 215 and 225W instead of going to 248W immediately. On the other hand, it was good to get rid of my frustration (at the cost of dubious training effect) and to at least know that the meter is capable of measuring higher values.

What next?

I will continue to measure in the coming weeks, probably after 20 minutes and 60 minutes on a 3x20min session. I hope to get more handy with the measurements, and at the same time to get some more data that would confirm the normal lactate levels for my body. I will probably do the next 3×20 session at 200W, slightly faster than I used to, to see what that brings me.

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lactaat 001

Nov 22 2015

Preparing to measure Lactate

I have always been an interested reader of the Lactate based training discussion over at Free Spirits, but I have been hesitating a long time, because

  1. The devices and the strips used are expensive
  2. It’s just another biophysical marker that you can use. Granted, it is more direct than Heart Rate based training, but still there are external influences (ambient temperature etc) that make it hard to interpret a reading

Still, this sounds convincing:

Recently, I got a tip about a Polish distributor selling the Cera-Chek Lactate meter. It is sold on the Polish market for a very reasonable price and also the strips come at about half the price of the competitors. The Polish distributor was initially a bit reluctant to sell to the Czech Republic (hello single European market!), but in the end he agreed to sell.

The device arrived on Friday and yesterday I did my first successful measurement, a baseline measurement before exercise, quietly sitting down and taking time to do everything right. This practice made me actually quite nervous for the real testing during and immediately after rowing ergometer exercise, because it showed that some practice will be needed to get fast and accurate readings:

  1. I need to prick deep enough with the lancing device. I find it very hard to get even the tiniest amount of blood after the stab. Then one is supposed to wipe clean the finger and wait for the second drop. Milking the finger to speed up the process is said to distort the readings, but with the blood flow in my right hand fingers, it is really a question of minutes.
  2. You need to get enough blood sucked into the strip to do a reliable measurement. My understanding is that the strips have a chemical substance that reacts with the lactate and then the device just measures the current between two electrodes. The magnitude of the current is then converted to lactate concentration. What happens if there is not enough blood? Do you get an under-reading?
  3. You need to measure fast. On the Free Spirits Forum, I read that the pros do a measurement in 30 seconds. This includes a routing of finger drying, finger washing, finger drying, finger stabbing, droplet wiping, strip preparation, application of second droplet, and taking 10 seconds to get the reading. I would be lucky to do all this in two minutes … and of course the body continues to  flush lactate from the muscles to the blood, then flush it from your blood. You have to be consistent to be able to compare measurements.

The test I wanted to do was the “long step test”. Basically you do 10 minute segments at increasing power, after which you measure blood lactate. You want to start a little below a power that gives 2.0 mmol/L, and end above it, so you determine the steady state power at which you train as close as possible to 2.0 mmol/L, which is believed to be most effective steady state training using a polarized training plan.

So what steps to use? I had a few clues of course:

  1. From my spiro tests I knew that my ventilatory threshold is about 234 W at 150 bpm.
  2. I have been fitting my season’s bests to a simple model using a “steady state” pace that I could sustain for hours and a limited “anaerobic” buffer that one empties during the test. A very crude model, but it is quite good in predicting paces on test pieces (just like the old “double the distance, add 5 seconds of pace). This model gave me 211 W as the steady state pace. Suppose this would be equal to my Maximal Lactate Steady State, than this would correspond to a blood lactate level between 3 and 4 mmol/L, which is also the recommended “intensive steady state” level recommended by many authors.
  3. My 2k SB is between 90-95% of Greg Smith (Quantified Rowing) in terms of Watts. He devised this test and runs it between 175W and 210W using 5W increments.

Difficult to decide. Starting at 160W and using 5W increments would bring me to 195W in 5 steps. That would probably be enough, but what if I hit 2.0 mmol/L already in the first step? Or if I wouldn’t hit it at all?

Here is what I decided to do:

Row 10 minutes at 160W/165W/170W/175W, taking 2 minutes of rest to try and attempt a lactate reading. At 175W, I would do the following:

  1. If just below 2.0, take another 10 minutes at 180W, then
    1. If above 2.0 at 180W, continue with 10W increments
    2. If not above 2.0 at 180W, continue with 5W increments
  2. If above 2.0, do next 10 minute intervals at 185W/195W/205W/220W

Sounded like a good plan.

I will follow up with a blog post about how the test really went. I will also publish a separate review of the Cera-Chek later. Here is a little teaser:

lactaat 001.JPG

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