Also, portable lactate testing meters are widely available now and run between $100 to $500, depending on the type of meter. Certain wearable technology, a new trend in the running community, can even have LT testing capabilities.
Assessing your own LT with a portable meter can be an effective way of seeing how your LT progresses throughout the year.
How to Improve LT
There are traditionally three main attack angles to improve your anaerobic threshold: long intervals with short recovery time, longer fartleks and traditional tempo runs.
Long intervals are what most runners are familiar with. Running a standard 1600 meters around the track (equivalent to one mile) three to five times with shorter recovery is a generation-old training plan used by beginners and pros alike.
Tempo fartleks—and even shorter interval runs with very short rest in between—are also ways you can move your threshold forward throughout the year.
LT for "Dummies"
As previously mentioned, most athletes can maintain a tempo at or near their anaerobic threshold for 20 minutes to an hour, the latter more common for highly trained runners with significant aerobic backgrounds. A runner's LT is generally five to 15 seconds per mile slower than their current 10K race fitness.
While access to a laboratory-based test or a personal lactate meter can indeed provide other useful information on top of this, the overwhelming majority of long-distance runners need to know only these ballpark performance parameters to implement them properly and see a steady improvement of LT.
Recent Articles:
- What Pace Should Runners Run Lactate Threshold Workouts
- Why Lactate Threshold is Crucial to Becoming a Better Distance Runner
- VO2 Max, Lactate Threshold and Aerobic Capacity for Beginners
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