Cycling

Like most serious athletes, you’ve probably been told that lactic acid causes a burning sensation and fatigue in your legs when you’re riding hard. This is one of many myths about lactic acid that are popular among cyclists. The truth is that your body never produces lactic acid—it produces lactate, a close cousin of lactic acid. And lactate does not directly cause muscle fatigue; in fact, lactate helps prevent fatigue. In other words, lactate is your friend, not your foe. What’s more, there are things you can do—including supplementation with ARX—that will make lactate an even more powerful friend.

It all starts with glucose, which is the muscles’ preferred energy source during cycling. Each glucose molecule is first broken down into a couple of pyruvate molecules. From here, the muscle cell has the option to release the energy in pyruvate directly with oxygen, or to first convert pyruvate into lactate, and then use oxygen to release energy.

Because the lactate pathway produces a lot more energy, your muscles rely on it increasingly as your cycling intensity increases. But at very high intensities, the muscles cannot process lactate as fast as it is created, so it begins to leak outside of the muscle cells into the bloodstream. Special lactate transporters in the blood then deliver lactate to the liver, where it is turned back into glucose, and other tissues, including the heart and brain, that use it directly as fuel.

So, as you can see, far from causing fatigue, lactate actually fuels performance. However, the accumulation of lactate in the muscles that occurs during intense exercise is indirectly associated with rising muscle acidity levels, which do eventually cause them to tire.

Training improves your body’s ability to shuttle lactate into the presence of oxygen within muscle cells and to shuttle lactate to other tissues through the bloodstream. These changes allow you to use more lactate as energy when riding hard and slows the accumulation of lactate in your muscles. As a result, you ride better. A strong lactate shuttling system also helps you with recovery. That’s because the more lactate you are able to use, the more energy you get from each molecule of glucose that’s broken down. This is important because your muscle glycogen supplies (glycogen is the storage for of glucose) are quite limited, and when they drop too low, your muscles begin to dismantle their own proteins to provide energy. The resulting muscle damage leaves them weakened and sore for the next day or so. A strong lactate shuttle delays the use of muscle protein for energy, enabling you to train longer with less muscle damage and recover faster.

Training is not the only way to strengthen the lactate shuttle. The ingredients in ARX are proven to do it as well. A double-blind placebo-controlled study found that ARX supplementation dramatically accelerated lactate clearance by 110% during cycling. But that’s not all. By sparing glycogen from use as a fuel, ARX also prevents muscle damage caused by the use of muscle proteins for fuel. That means you wake up the morning after a hard workout or race with less soreness and lingering muscle damage and you have a better ride that day.