I am not sure what the disagreement is about. Coggan says Olbrecht is wrong. I don't believe he is wrong. Nothing in the articles that Coggan listed in any way contradicts anything that Olbrecht says. They are irrelevant or consistent with what was said about him. Of course, no one is absolutely right on everything and Jan is the first to say he is constantly learning new things.

My only objective is to introduce the ideas he has been using in a very successful career advising athletes at all levels but definitely with lots of high level ones. It is not just Americans that do not understand what he is recommending, there are plenty of Europeans who do not understand what he doing. I sat in a bar once at ACSM talking with two of the most distinguished exercise scientists from Germany discussing lactate testing and they had not a clue about Mader's ideas. All they could say was that the 4 mmol/l measure was not a good test and that is what they associated with Mader.

In the early to mid 80's Jan, Michael Lohberg (swim coach of Bonn swim team) and Oram Madsen (a recent Ph.D from Cologne at the time) all went off to St. Croix to set the swimming world on fire using the ideas developed by Mader and others at Cologne. They failed.

Lohberg ended up in Florida where he became a successful swim coach. Madsen went home to Norway and became involved in Olympic sports. Olbrecht went back to Cologne and finished his Ph.D.

In the mean time, Mader solved the problem of why people with the same lactate results performed differently in the same events and why they reacted differently to the same training approaches. He found out that the anaerobic system was causing these differences between athletes. He essentially discovered what was behind the lactate threshold or maximal lactate steady state depending on what definition is used.

This led to the model of metabolism I mentioned above and which Olbrecht validated with his Dissertation. Mader was his thesis adviser, Along the way Olbrecht validated something he calls a distance test and which people here call the FTP. He did it for swimming and the test is well known in swimming circles as the T30 for the time to swim 3000 meters or the distance one can swim in 30 minutes. Olbrecht rejected this type of test because it did not tell one what was behind the result. One needed to know the aerobic and anaerobic contributions in order to know how to properly train the athlete.

The question is how to test for the anaerobic component. Testing for the aerobic capacity was well established but not for anaerobic capacity. Testing for the anaerobic system is more problematic but does not mean it is not a factor in training and performance. This led to a unique test which I linked to above. The test is briefly described in this video (made for a Community College video course)

https://www.youtube.com/...amp;feature=youtu.be

But one needs the model of metabolism to use this test so other less precise tests for anaerobic capacity were developed for athletes that were not elite.

Also how does one train the anaerobic system to the proper level. This is an issue too. There is never enough aerobic capacity and the athlete is in a life long effort to raise VO2 max as we see here with questions about which zones and how much to train in each. But anaerobic capacity must be adjusted for the event to be optimal. This means training it up or down depending on what is required.

For distance events this usually means lowering anaerobic capacity but it cannot be lowered too much even for Ironman length events. There is confusion here when this comes us as most seem to think that anaerobic training is trying to make the system stronger when in fact most of the training for the anaerobic system is to make it weaker.

So is Olbrecht wrong? I doubt it except that no one is absolutely right on everything. I will keep on presenting his ideas on threads where it is appropriate.


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Jerry Cosgrove

Sports Resource Group
http://www.lactate.com
https://twitter.com/@LactatedotCom