Greetings!
I recently joined John Gay on The Shakeout Podcast to talk about performance supplements. Before long, we found ourselves revisiting a familiar villain known as lactate.
I expanded on some of my thoughts from that conversation in my other newsletter, Physiologically Speaking, and thought I’d share that piece here since it’s incredibly relevant to runners!
Enjoy.
For decades, lactate was blamed for burning legs and muscle fatigue. Now the pendulum has swung in the other direction (as things tend to do in this space). Lactate is a fuel, a signaling molecule… and it might even be something athletes should consume during exercise (I have some strong thoughts here).
Apparently, lactate has completed its redemption arc.
But during our conversation, I kept coming back to the contradiction that some products promise to improve performance by lowering lactate, while other products promise the same thing by giving you more of it. The supplement industry has managed to turn lactate into both the problem and the solution. So which is it?
To answer that, we need to start with what lactate actually does.
Your body produces it all the time (even while you’re sitting on the couch). As exercise intensity increases, you burn carbohydrate at a faster rate and produce more lactate. But lactate isn’t simply discarded. Your muscles, heart, and other tissues can use it as fuel. The liver can even recycle it back into glucose!
And despite what many of us learned in high school biology, lactate isn’t what makes your muscles acidic or causes your legs to burn. Lactate rises alongside the metabolic changes associated with hard exercise, which is why it became such an easy target. But this is mere guilt by association. Lactate is more like a dashboard reading that tells us how hard the “metabolic engine” is running. Why does this matter? If we start with the wrong model of lactate, we’re going to evaluate every lactate-related supplement incorrectly.
Take sodium bicarbonate. It has a legitimate use in performance because it helps the body manage the acidity that accumulates during intense exercise, potentially allowing one to sustain a hard effort slightly longer. But it doesn’t work by eliminating lactate. It works by improving the body’s buffering capacity. That makes bicarbonate most relevant for races and workouts where acidity becomes a major limitation. The catch, of course, is gastrointestinal distress.
Once we separate acidity from lactate, supplements designed specifically to lower lactate become harder to interpret. Their pitch still sounds appealing because many runners carry the old idea that lactate is something we want less of. If high lactate is bad, lower lactate must be good.
But what does a lower number actually mean? This is key. Maybe your body is clearing lactate more effectively. That could be useful. Or maybe you’re producing less lactate because you aren’t breaking down carbohydrate as quickly. That might mean your glycolytic system—the system helping you produce energy during hard exercise—isn’t working as aggressively. That’s not useful, and in fact, it’s counterproductive.
This is why I’m not convinced that “reduces lactate” is enough of a selling point. Show me that an athlete can run faster, produce more power, or hold the same effort longer. The goal isn’t to win the lactate test.
And just as companies are finding new ways to sell us less lactate (e.g., bicarb and the new guy on the scene, Nomio), another category of products has arrived promising to give us more of it.
Lactate gels take the opposite approach by providing lactate as another potential fuel source. The idea is that glucose and fructose use specific pathways to enter the body. At very high carbohydrate intakes, those pathways can become limiting. Lactate uses a different route, so perhaps it can provide additional energy on top of the carbohydrates an athlete is already consuming.
It’s a clever idea. And physiologically speaking, it makes some sense. This is a familiar sequence in sports nutrition: someone proposes an interesting mechanism, elite athletes begin experimenting with it, the product arrives, and the controlled evidence follows later. Maybe lactate gels will become an important part of endurance fueling. I’m genuinely interested to see where the research goes. But right now, they’re an experiment, and certainly not a replacement for carbohydrates.
So where does that leave us with good old lactate?
Lactate doesn’t need to be feared, and it doesn’t need to be worshipped. Bicarbonate may be useful because it helps manage acidity—not because lactate is toxic. A lactate-lowering supplement needs to demonstrate more than a smaller number on a meter. And a lactate gel needs to improve performance before we declare it the next endurance-fueling breakthrough.
I wouldn’t call myself a skeptic, but I want to see some evidence that a supplement improves performance before I give it the green light. Anecdotes are powerful in the supplement world, and while interesting, several elite athletes claiming they “feel like they raced better” after taking [X] supplement isn’t convincing enough for me. That’s what I’m seeing with this new Nomio supplement (we also talk about that in the podcast) and several others.
Regarding lactate specifically, I don’t think the endurance sports world has quite decided whether it’s friend or foe. And I think the industry is taking advantage of this ambiguity somewhat. I’m not attributing any of the big performance breakthroughs to these novel ergogenic aids… for now.
I just think it’s the carbs (and the shoes… definitely the shoes).
Thanks for reading. As always—Run Long, Run Healthy,
~Brady~
Sounds like this may be an individual specific area
Back in the late 90’s and early 00’s I was taking ‘phos fuel’ (no longer on the market from what I can tell). It was promoted at lowering lactate as I remember. And I must say I ran many a marathon feeling comfortable and confident and faster. Was it my youth, my training, the phos fuel??? A placebo effect? Lots of variables perhaps…