Author(s): QUITTMANN, O., Institution: GERMAN SPORT UNIVERSITY COLOGNE, Country: GERMANY, Abstract-ID: 1718

INTRODUCTION:
In 1986, two pioneers set their sight beyond the horizon. What sounds like the plot of the film ‘Top Gun’ actually referrers to the theory of Alois ‘Maverick’ Mader and Hermann ‘Goose’ Heck on the metabolic origin of ‘anaerobic threshold’ [1]. It was assumed that maximal rates of oxidative and substrate-level phosphorylation are promising parameters to simulate energy metabolism. Thereby, the authors introduced a new parameter that we know today as maximal lactate accumulation rate (ċLamax).
Research on ċLamax has gained increased attention in recent years and is already applied in several (endurance) sports. However, this parameter falls victim to physiological misconceptions and suffers from inconsistencies regarding terminology, procedures and calculation approaches. This hinders the proper use in science and practice aiming to improve exercise testing and training prescription.
METHODS:
To provide recommendations for application and future research and to summarise the current evidence on ċLamax, the findings of sixty accepted peer-review Journal articles in English language were extracted in a recent invited review [2]. This article highlights the origin, development, terminology, procedures, reliability, specificity, applicability and adaptability of ċLamax.
RESULTS:
The ċLamax has already been applied in sports like (hand-)cycling, running, swimming, rowing, kayaking and paratriathlon, gained increased popularity since 2017 and has spread across the globe. The percentage of German affiliations (260 authorships in total) decreased from 80% (until 03/2023) to 55% (03/2023–10/2025). Six different categories for terminology and astonishing 23 different abbreviations were found. Most frequently (n=23), ċLamax was determined by performing a 15-s all-out sprint test, while recent reviews recommend 10–12 s [2,3]. Females accounted for only 25% of all participants tested in all studies. Reporting of warm-up and starting procedures as well as post-exercise blood sampling was quite heterogenous. Expect for using handheld analysers, ċLamax demonstrated ‘good’ to ‘excellent’ reliability and was found to be highly specific to extremity and exercise modality. Whereas ċLamax was associated with sprint performance and strength parameters, its utility to predict/simulate individual performances ≥ 1 min was inconclusive.
CONCLUSION:
The ċLamax is a promising augmentation for metabolic profiling that can be determined with fairly low effort and time. However, this experimental approach only allows for a net estimate of glycolytic abilities that does not reflect cellular processes. Future studies need to validate ċLamax by means of enzyme activity and/or muscle fiber typology, focus on female athletes (currently only 25%) and assess its adaptability to certain (high-intensity) training regimes. Additionally, there is currently no data on the ‘durability’ of ċLamax.

References
1) Mader & Heck (1986) Int J Sports Med
2) Quittmann (2026) Eur J Appl Physiol
3) Langley et al. (2025) J Sci Cycling