I understand how lactate works to a certain degree, but the important thing is that you can burn that lactic acid by cooling/warming down after a workout (ie walking after a footrace).
I’ve heard that built-up lactic acid helps build muscle if you keep it, but I’ve also heard that it’s good to burn asap after a workout.
So after hypertrophy weight-training, should I be somehow cooling down my muscles?
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>So after hypertrophy weight-training, should I be somehow cooling down my muscles?
From what I can find, the research shows that cooling down your muscles speeds up recovery, which would be good if you are a professional athlete who needs to perform well the following day. However the muscle growth is reduced from this, therefore for hypertrophy you should not do anything special to speed up recovery.
You don’t really burn lactate in the sense you’re thinking, and you can’t do anything to lactate in your blood–warmup/cooldown have no effect on blood lactate. Your body removes/uses it in about an hour after exercise.
Lactic acid is also not why we experience muscle soreness–either the acute form or DOMS.
The science is kind of out on whether cooling after lifting helps or hinders hypertrophy though. It may depend on the temperature and duration. While an ice bath may decrease the inflammatory response, it may *also* decrease the hypertrophic response by slowing the production/absorption of those chemicals. One of those chemicals may be lactate, which would be a strike against it.
But just cooling down doesn’t actually appear to do anything. Cooldowns are for teambuilding if anything, but are otherwise going the way of static stretching before exercise.
Lactic acid is produced when your cells don’t have as much oxygen as they want to have when they are making energy.
Lactic acid is essentially a waste product.
You get rid of it by hydrating and peeing it out or your liver chewing it up.
In anaerobic metabolism – active either when you’ve maxed out your aerobic metabolism or when you are using fast-twitch muscle fibers to do high strength moves – the muscles will burn glucose and produce lactate.
That lactate is cleared out of the muscles and is burned by other tissues in the body. The ability to clear lactate quickly is something that endurance athletes train for as it allows them to produce more power.
Lactate is what makes the muscles burn. It generally takes a few minute at most to clear out.
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