It looks like you have done the “Alternative version” of the testing protocol. This protocol should only be used by athletes with a poor ability to reach high blood lactate concentrations:
The standard protocol looks like this:
As you can see, the 1:20 max effort you did is way shorter than it should be for athletes with a normal ability to reach highish blood lactate concentrations.
As an example, when I’ve done the lactate test I’ve done 6 + 6 + 3 + 3 (all out) minutes.
Your all out test is simply too short, so you don’t achieve anywhere near your max lactate concentration. You got to 14.5 in the (submaximal) second stage, but only 10.2 in the final stage. This throws everything off completely.
The tester chose the wrong protocol for you (and it would be wrong for most IMHO). But more than that, when the tester sees those kinds of results vs. your power outputs for the different stages, it should be immediately clear to them that this doesn’t make sense an something went wrong. As far as I’m concerned they should have noticed this and simply have you come in another day and retake part (or all) of the test for no extra cost.
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Thank you, it was the answer I feared but highly suspected.
I think as a more general comment, as with almost all types of testing, no test is better than the proper execution of it. GIGO - garbage in, garbage out, always applies.
Obviously in this instance where doing a lactate-based test under the supervision of somebody, it’s not the athlete’s fault if things go wrong but the tester’s.
But the same principle applies to almost any test - the INSCYD critical power test, 20 minute FTP tests and so on. The major benefit of the ramp test is that it’s hard to screw it up, and it is a major benefit (although it also has many drawbacks and I’m not a fan of it overall). For the critical power testing, I’ve had to ask athletes to redo a certain part of the test many, many times, because you can’t just plug numbers into a system and hope to get useful results out of it. Hope is not a strategy. You have to check that the execution was on point and the results aligned with each other (e.g. if 20-minute power is only 75% of 4-minute power, there probably was some sandbagging going on and the 20-minute test needs to be retaken). I assume it might be common to see ‘lazy testing’ just like lazy coaching, just plugging in the numbers and vomiting out the results without thinking and verifying that the test was good.
The same phenomenon happens on an athlete level with a number of “automatic-profiling” systems, where it’s easily happened to blindly follow an automatically calculated threshold (or something else) without ever stopping to think if it is a valid number based on high quality data.
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