Very interesting excerpt from a Dan Pfaff (genius) interview I just read, I thought this could spark some interesting discussion. I realize that this topic was probably covered over in the Lactate Threshold thread but I might as well read ‘War and Peace’, it would probably take just as long to sort through!
So as a workout unfolds how do you know when the athlete is becoming prone to injury?
I look at postural integrity. If they start to change postures and sub-recruit muscles they shouldn’t be using I stop the workout. I look at the reflexivity of the joints and how fluid the motion is. If the fluidity goes away and it starts to look mechanical we stop. In terms of recovery between sessions and readiness to train that day, depending on the budget we also look at many markers of recovery from pulse rate right through to using portable blood lactate analysers and taking blood and urine to look for chemical markers.
Doing this kind of analysis on world class athletes tells you a lot of things, for example, on acceleration development days we may do 5x3x10-40m with 3-5min minutes between runs. Well with guys like Donovan Bailey, Oberdaley Thompson, Karim Street-Thompson, Bruny Surin, they would be pumping 18mmols of lactate at the end of that workout whereas a world class quarter miler at the end of the race is only pumping 10-11mmol. So lactate isn’t the enemy. Actually if you study the Krebs cycle lactate is very anabolic so we want lactate, we just want to control what days we get it, how much and what we do when it is in the blood stream. The better the power speed athlete the greater the amounts of lactate they can produce. I mean we have throwers on the Olympic platform and when they are done with the lifts they are pumping 12-14mmols of lactate and they haven’t run a step. Also on block workout days we then go to the Olympic platform and we setup curves of lactate infusion because one of the problems we have in sprinting, at the world class level, is four races in two days at the big championships and so there are huge slopes to these blood lactate levels. The athletes have to learn how to weather very steep lactate introductions into the tissue and then rapid dismissal of it. And that is very different to putting an athlete in tempo training or interval training – during which you would traditionally get an athlete to a certain level of lactate and do work there. Sprinters and Jumpers never encounter that kind of lactate environment in competition so why train them there?
http://www.down-right.co.uk/2008/08/dan-pfaff-training.html
http://www.down-right.co.uk/2008/07/dan-pfaff-importance-of-rest-and.html