Molly’s Fitness Challenge: Find your High Intensity “Sweet Spot”
The most metabolically and mentally taxing workout there is besides competition itself, is training at your lactate threshold. The lactate threshold is the point during aerobic exercise in which lactic acid accumulates in your blood and muscles leading to jello legs, or more technically, the interference of muscle contractions, and a rapid increase in breathing where you cannot talk anymore, or more technically, where it is getting much harder to bring in enough oxygen and release more carbon dioxide. Exercise duration at this level is relatively short lived.
Sound fun? Not really, but training here is really the “sweet spot” of aerobic training. It improves our ability to train harder for longer periods of time. It also results in a huge caloric expenditure both during and after exercise!
So, how do you figure out your lactate threshold?
GET IT: Heart rate monitor (simple polar monitor FT1 model)
TEST IT: Map out a course that doesn’t have a lot of big hills or traffic lights and takes you about 20 minutes to complete. You can also do this inside on the spinning bike or treadmill. Make sure you warm up for at least 15 minutes then start the clock and go “all-out” for 20 minutes. At the end, get an average heart rate for the test and this will be an estimate of your threshold heart rate.
TRAIN IT: From here you can perform one or two threshold workouts per week that look like this:
Warm up at easy endurance pace for at least 15 minutes
MAIN SET: 3 x 10 minutes at lactate threshold heart rate and equal recovery
Cool down at easy endurance pace for at least 15 minutes.
Stretch.
Feel free to email Molly at molly.throdahl@ethosfitness.com for additional guidance through this challenge!
Ethos’ Personal Trainer, Molly Throdahl, BA. Molly is certified as a personal trainer by American College of Sports Medicine and is working towards her Master’s degree in Exercise Science. She is a competitive cyclist.
