Peter Attia

But now we get to a third level of lactate which is really called the second lactate threshold and that's at higher and higher levels and at this point once the body gets above that level

And this level varies quite a bit by individual.

Maybe if we have time, I'll go into how you can measure that.

I talked about this at length in the first podcast with Olaf, Alexander, Boo, but we can come back to that.

But anyway, these higher levels of output, glycolytic lactate production in the working muscles,

completely surpasses the body's ability to clear it.

At this point, blood lactate starts to rise much more sharply.

It's accompanied by hydrogen ion because the lactate is negatively charged.

The hydrogen is positively charged.

So they're balanced kind of one-to-one.

You have this acidity that occurs.

It turns out that it's the hydrogen ion and not the lactate

that is effectively poisoning the muscle.

It actually prevents the actin and myosin filaments in the muscle from being able to relax.

Again, for most people, that second lactate threshold, or really third one, depending on how you're counting them, occurs somewhere between four and five millimole of lactate.

That's a much more variable number.

Okay, so I'm going to stop there.

There's a lot we could talk about there, but hopefully that kind of sets the groundwork.

I think it comes down to context.

I think there's a lot of confusion around this.