A new lactate gel quietly appeared in the WorldTour during the Tour de France, sparking plenty of curiosity. But what exactly is lactate, why has it been misunderstood for decades, and could supplementing it actually improve cycling performance? We separate the science from the marketing and examine whether lactate gels are the next breakthrough – or simply the latest nutrition trend.
Few molecules in sports nutrition are as misunderstood as lactate. For decades (and honestly, still), lactate was blamed for the burning sensation during hard exercise and even the muscle soreness you felt the next day. Today, we know that’s simply not true. Lactate isn’t a metabolic waste product, it’s one of the body’s most important fuels.
So, before the marketing machine gets into full swing and the lactate era dawns upon us, let’s take a look at what lactate actually is, why it’s misunderstood, and whether these new lactate gels might live up to the hype.
What Is Lactate?
Lactate serves several critical roles:
- A rapidly available fuel for working muscles, the heart, and the brain.
- A precursor for rebuilding glucose and glycogen.
- A signaling molecule involved in exercise adaptations and recovery.
Rather than being the villain it was once made out to be, lactate is a link between glycolytic and aerobic energy production that allows your body to continue producing energy during intense exercise.
Why Does Lactate Have Such a Bad Reputation?
For decades, athletes were taught that lactate (or lactic acid) caused fatigue and the burning sensation during hard exercise. We now know that’s not true.
Lactate appears whenever you’re exercising intensely because it’s produced alongside rapid ATP (energy) turnover, not because it’s causing muscles to fail or fatigue. Lactate is more like a firefighter arriving at the scene of a fire than the person who started it. Remember, correlation isn’t causation.
Where Does Lactate Come In?
At low to moderate exercise intensities, the mitochondria (the powerhouse of your cells) can keep up with energy demand. Pyruvate (a molecule made as part of glycolysis or carbohydrate breakdown) enters the mitochondria, where it continues through aerobic metabolism to produce energy.
As exercise intensity rises, however, carbohydrate breakdown begins producing pyruvate faster than the mitochondria can process it. A traffic jam develops, while at the same time glycolysis rapidly converts an important molecule, NAD⁺, into NADH, gradually reducing the supply of NAD⁺ needed to keep glycolysis running. Without enough NAD⁺, glycolysis slows, limiting your ability to rapidly produce ATP during high-intensity exercise.
Rather than allowing glycolysis to slow or stop, the enzyme lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) converts pyruvate into lactate:
Pyruvate + NADH + H⁺ → Lactate + NAD⁺
This reaction regenerates NAD⁺, allowing glycolysis to continue producing energy at a very high rate. In other words, lactate is at the center of a rapid recycling system that keeps energy production moving when demand is highest while also consuming some of the H⁺ that would otherwise make muscles more acidic and less able to produce force efficiently.
What Could Supplementing with Lactate Do?
This idea isn’t new; however, the engineering behind it may have changed dramatically. Researchers have investigated lactate supplementation before but ran into two major barriers:
Dosage
The dosage thought to have an impact on metabolism is roughly 10–25 g of lactate per hour. To deliver that amount, lactate must be bound to a salt like sodium or calcium, which would also require consuming a very large amount of those minerals. This isn’t unlike the early challenges with ketone supplements, they tasted terrible, were expensive, and often caused GI issues.
Impact on the Gut
Lactate (apparently) doesn’t taste good, but even if you could consume the required amount, your digestive system may have other thoughts. Early studies using sodium and calcium lactate reported plenty of gastrointestinal side effects, which is likely why products currently on the market contain milligrams, not grams, of the stuff.
From Lab to Field claims to have solved the challenges of older formulations, creating a gel that supposedly tastes good, costs about what a premium nutrition gel would cost, and delivers 40 g of carbohydrate plus 5 g of lactate in a 1:1 glucose-to-fructose ratio.
In theory, lactate supplementation could do a few things:
Complement carbohydrate intake
Lactate uses the MCT transporter rather than the SGLT1 or GLUT5 transporters that glucose and fructose use to get into the cell, so it wouldn’t compete for absorption. Perhaps this also means athletes with a lower ability to absorb and oxidize carbohydrates could have another way to help close that gap in energy intake. Another thought is that because lactate is already several steps further along in carbohydrate metabolism, it’s essentially “pre-digested,” meaning it could potentially be utilized more quickly and provide energy sooner.
Buffering
Lactate acts as a buffer, taking up some H⁺ that would otherwise make the muscle more acidic. Supplementation could, in theory, help soak up some of that acid, thereby helping maintain acid-base balance in the muscle.
Spare glycogen
At lower exercise intensities, taking lactate gels may decrease reliance on carbohydrates and therefore spare some of your muscles’ glycogen stores. Replenishing muscle glycogen during exercise is difficult, but perhaps lactate could provide another fuel source that allows your body to conserve some of those carbohydrate stores.
I’ve used the words “may,” “could,” and “in theory” a lot, and for good reason. This application of lactate supplementation is very new. While lactate supplementation has been around before, it largely faded away because of formulation and usability challenges. If those challenges have truly been solved, we’re likely to see a wave of new research examining the performance implications of lactate during exercise. The catch is that we’ll probably have to wait 3–5 years for that research and its practical applications to become clear.
From Lab to Field even states on its website:
“Research remains ongoing. Further human research is required to fully understand optimal applications across different sports and training environments.”
There are no peer-reviewed studies on this application of lactate supplementation, only a few internal company studies. That doesn’t necessarily mean the product won’t work or that you should steer clear, but let’s think back to ketones. Ketones were once claimed to increase FTP by 15% (among other things) and were marketed as the next breakthrough in sports nutrition. Years later, they were largely found to be ineffective for improving cycling performance, though they may offer some modest benefits for recovery. For many athletes, that reality doesn’t justify drinking a $4 bottle of something that tastes like nail polish.
Summary
So, while lactate and lactate gels are certainly interesting, I wouldn’t spend a lot of money on it or make it a major part of your training until we have better evidence. Until then, expect a full-on assault across your social media feed about its benefits. Just remember: in sports nutrition, marketing almost always moves faster than science.
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