What is the "Anaerobic Threshold"?

In the mid of the 20th century, K. Wasserman coined the term "Anaerobic Threshold" in terms of cardiopulmonary exercise testing. At these times, mainly gas exchange measurements have been used for the detection of the Anaerobic Threshold:
Thereby, the essential benefit of this method was that subjects (e.g., severe sick patients) must not have been maximally exhausted during exercise testing.

Blood lactate increase and CO₂ exhalation

The "Anaerobic Threshold" as defined by Wasserman et al. can be determined from gas exchange by the onset of supplemental CO₂-production (red arrow/left panel below).

"Excess"-CO₂ is described to be due to the increased lactate concentration and metabolic acidosis during exercise. Protones are buffered by bicarbonate what is releasing CO₂ to the lungs (middle and right panel). This means that the "Anaerobic Threshold" by the concept of Wasserman et al., known also as "Lactate (Anaerobic) Threshold" or "LT" can be determined much more easily directly from the course of blood lactate than by the gas exchange measurements (Wasserman et al. 1986; Beaver et al. 1985, Roecker et al. 2000, Péronnet, F. et. al 2006).

Sports scientific training guidance from blood lactate measurements

After Wasserman's innovation, the conceptual framework of the "Anaerobic Threshold" has been expanded from the pure diagnostics of performance to scientific evidenced training guidance and recommendations to improve aerobic training efficiency. This advancement was significantly influenced by the work group around Alois Mader, Wildor Hollmann and Hermann Heck in Cologne/Germany.

Use of blood lactate measurements especially from capillary blood samples simplified application and reliability of metabolic training guidance fundamentally.
From these times, however, some confusion came around about the term "Anaerobic Threshold": the original concept by Wasserman does not mean the same reference than many other measures or principles with partly the same or confusable names, but at much higher exercise intensities and blood lactate levels.

What is Ergonizer Software achieving for you?

Blood lactate measurement is an easy task. But this applies not to the calculation of the "Individual Anaerobic Threshold" (IAT) and other measures from the lactate increase.

The increase characteristics of blood lactate must be fitted against time or power output in terms of the so-called lactate-performance-curve. Manual creation and interpretation of these curves is not only troublesome, it's above all unreliable: Different investigators give different results if lactate curves are applied manually. An automated algorithm to generate lactate curve fittings has to be robust against little variations in the measurements to fit the real course of lactate increase optimally. Hence, main aspect of Ergonizer was, to create the best possible technical framework in the generation of graphically and mathematically realistic interpolations of lactate values during incremental exercise. The resulting test reports are the base of rock-solid training recommendations and performance measurements for many types of sports and other application areas.

Ergonizer Software optimizes lactate-performances-curves in a parameterized spline fitting algorithm based on many thousands of real reference measurements from the past.

We use the concept of "IAT" with net-increase above base line, which regards the variable blood lactate concentration at rest. Furthermore, we use algorithms in Ergonizer, which allow the reliable determination even for the "Anaerobic Threshold" by Wasserman (LT).