I recently started biking again – commuting to work via bike is the only time I have to get in a workout. It has great benefits, including increased production of growth hormones and testosterone. It also gives a tremendous ‘burn’ to the legs, not to mention the lungs (thanks Halifax hills)!

These experiences of late have spurred me to poke around the web for information on lactic acid. Here’s an interesting article I found from the Health In Motion blog, that I would like to reprint here:

Lactic Acid burn is normally associated with hard training, not necessarily fat loss. But Lactic Acid can unlock the key to rapid fat loss while preserving muscle. Plus, you’ll discover exactly how to train to maximize the benefits of Lactic Acid.

This info is so effective, I’ve decided to expand on it and put together a fat loss program designed AROUND Lactic Acid Training. It’s not just a small part – it IS the program.

This program doesn’t address nutrition or diet, just the weight training. If you need more info on what to eat:

DO NOT eat anything at least 2 to 3 hours before these workouts. Having any food in you will defeat the hormonal purpose of the workout, which is Growth Hormone secretion. GH secretion is blunted when blood sugar is higher, which happens as a result of food intake. Train on an empty stomach and you’ll get better results.

How Lactic Acid Training Works:

In a nutshell, this style of training is designed to force your body to produce a lot of Lactic Acid in the target muscles and keep it there. Research has shown that the presence of Lactic Acid can cause an increase in both growth hormone and testosterone secretion by the body. These are two of the most anabolic (muscle building) and lipolytic (fat burning) hormones in the human body! The result? Your body is forced to build muscle while burning tremendous amounts of fat.

Lactic Acid Training causes your muscles to fail due to lower cellular pH (the acid lowers pH, which is the acid-base balance in the blood. When it’s gets too low, your muscles are unable to contract effectively) and not due to contractile failure (the point where your muscle fibers are too fatigued to continue). Not being able to push to contractile failure protects the muscles from excessive breakdown, which is critical to preserving muscle mass under reduced-calorie conditions, i.e. dieting.

Lactic Acid Training also burns quite a lot of calories during the session itself. This is because of the very short rest periods and high volume of work. This, in turn, keeps your heart rate in an aerobic conditioning zone even during the rest, further increasing the benefits of the training.

Increased Growth Hormone levels also increase the use of fat for energy during recovery after intense exercise. This means your body will be burning fat in order to help you recover from your training!

As well, high-rep Lactic Acid Training trains the Type 1 muscle fibers (endurance-oriented), developing and multiplying the cellular energy furnaces known as mitochondria, which rely greatly on fats to supply energy to your cells. This means your body will become more productive at burning fat even while at rest.

The high volume of the training you will be doing will also help to stimulate Growth Hormone production. Higher training volume has been shown to produce a better Growth Hormone response than lower-volume training.

The high-rep qualities of the training helps to develop circulation in the muscles by increasing the number of capillaries (tiny blood vessels) feeding the muscles. More circulation means more nutrients which means easier muscle growth down the line!

Put all these amazing benefits together and you’ve got one incredibly powerful training technique!

How To Do It:

The basic execution of Lactic Acid Training is very simple.

Pick one single exercise, using a weight you can get around 20 to 50 reps with.
Do as many reps as you can until your muscles are burning so strongly and are so flooded with lactic acid that you can’t move the weight. You will probably have to drop the weight pretty quickly by this point!

Rest 20 seconds.

Now do another set with the same weight. You will probably only be able to get 8 to 10 reps with that weight, even if you just did 50 reps with it a few seconds ago. The short rest period means the lactic acid hasn’t had time to fully clear and you will fail due to lactic acid build-up in the muscles rather than true muscular failure (which is what we want).

Rest 20 seconds then do another set.

Repeat this for a total of 6 to 12 sets per bodypart, depending on the program requirements and which bodypart you’re working.

The number of reps you can do may drop down to 5 or even less but don’t worry, rep numbers are not particularly important here. You’re basically trying to churn out as much lactic acid as possible – the 20 seconds rest is not enough time for the body to clear it away but enough time to allow you to go again very soon. Quite often you’ll find that after a few sets you hit a steady state where you’re using the same weight and getting the same number of reps on each set.

One of the nice features of this type of training is that you can reduce your warm-up to almost nothing as the first set may be done with such light weight that it can actually serve as your warm-up.

As well, the negative or eccentric aspect of the rep (generally the lowering of the weight) need not be emphasized when doing Lactic Acid Training. Research has shown that the positive or concentric phase of the rep (when the muscle is contracting) is more productive in terms of Growth Hormone release than the negative phase.

This doesn’t mean you should ignore the negative – just don’t focus on it to the detriment of the positive phase of the rep. In plain English, it will be better to focus on getting more reps than on doing long, slow negatives.

You may use two exercises per bodypart but one is usually best as 20 seconds is not much time to switch between exercises. Have the next exercise set up and ready to go if you do switch. If you are doing an exercise that is done one arm or leg at a time, e.g. 1 arm pushdowns, don’t take 20 seconds rest between sets, just jump back and forth between the two arms without any rest for the full number of sets you’re doing. The same thing applies to legs.

Get more information about lactic acid training by visiting the Health In Motion blog.

Cheers!