Blood Lactate Levels: What Is Blood Lactate and What Are the Effects of Lactic Acidosis?

What is Considered a “Normal” Concentration of Blood Lactate?

Everyone’s baseline blood lactate concentration is different, but there’s a typical expected range for healthy individuals. This is usually about 1-2 mmol/L (millimoles per litre) when you’re resting. When you’re exercising, this figure can rise higher than 20 mmol/L.

What Causes Blood Lactate to Increase?

As mentioned earlier, your body can maintain its baseline blood lactate level when resting. The metabolic pathways to process lactic acid clear it from your bloodstream at the same rate as it’s produced, yielding almost no change in concentration. But when you’re intensely exercising, your muscles don’t receive as much oxygen, and therefore the processes to remove lactic acid can’t keep up with the production of lactic acid. This leads to a quick increase in blood lactate concentration.

Lactic acid concentration in the blood increases during exercise, but other conditions can also cause an unusually high blood lactate level. For example, impaired tissue oxygenation, where cells and tissues in the body aren’t receiving enough oxygen, can be the cause of high blood lactate.

Lactic Acidosis: The Effects of a High Blood Lactate Level

Too much lactic acid in the bloodstream is called lactic acidosis. Normally, your body clears lactic acid out of the blood at the same rate as it’s produced, but with lactic acidosis, a build-up of lactic acid in the blood leads to a low pH level, making the blood more acidic. Typical causes of lactic acidosis include infections, some medications, a lack of sufficient oxygen in the blood, problems with metabolism, and the list goes on.

The effect of Blood Lactate Acidosis is that an athlete or person cannot maintain their current level of output. As such they need to slow down or at worst, stop to recover.

What Are The Main Symptoms of Lactic Acidosis?

If you’ve ever gotten a stitch after running for too long, you have a taste of what lactic acidosis can feel like. Nausea, weakness, fatigue, muscle cramps and an overall feeling of tiredness are common symptoms of lactic acidosis. You’re also likely to be breathing very fast as your body tries to catch up on the oxygen it’s been missing, and your muscles will probably burn or ache, as lactic acidosis is often kicked off by intense exercise or physical exertion.

However, there are other causes of lactic acidosis. Certain medical conditions can impair the body's ability to get rid of lactic acid, such as severe infections (the technical term being sepsis), kidney or liver disease, and certain types of cancer. There are also a few types of medications that can cause lactic acidosis, such as the type 2 diabetes medication metformin, and medications used to treat HIV/AIDS. Of course, genetic factors and your overall health come into play in your propensity for lactic acidosis, as well as alcohol consumption and/or substance abuse.

How are Blood Lactate Levels Monitored and Analysed?

Lactic acidosis can sometimes be life-threatening. If you have reason to believe you have a high propensity for lactic acidosis, or you exercise a lot, it’s a smart idea to get your blood lactate levels checked to see if they lie in the normal range or not. By testing your blood lactate levels you can find out if enough oxygen is reaching your muscle tissues (insufficient oxygen is called hypoxia). It can also help to diagnose sepsis, a severe bodily response to infection, which can be deadly.

Cranlea Human Performance offers several highly effective products for measuring and monitoring your blood lactic acid levels. Our Lactate Plus Meter offers a full scope of analysis for measuring your blood lactate levels from rest to peak performance, with a range of 0.3-25.0 mmol/L.  All you need to do is prick your finger (with a single-use lancet),  discard the first drop of blood with an alcohol wipe (as this could contain contaminants), place the strip that is already inserted into the meter onto the new drop of blood, and insert it back into the metre to receive a result in only thirteen seconds.

It’s a portable handheld device that offers exceptional convenience for checking your blood lactate levels when you’re resting and when you’re exercising. You can buy our vials of Lactate Test Strips to use with the metre, and they have a shelf life of 12-24 months.

They’re single-use, 28-gauge lancets that puncture your skin painlessly. To ensure proper operation of the Lactate Plus Meter, you should run control tests using our Lactate Plus Control Solution. You should do this before your very first test, and at least once a week thereafter. Every time you open a vial of new strips you should do this, and definitely if you drop your metre too.

Applications of Blood Lactate Monitoring

Monitoring your blood lactate levels goes beyond just ensuring you don’t fall victim to lactic acidosis. Blood lactate monitoring finds lots of applications across a wide range of industries. For example, medical practitioners use it as a diagnostic tool, identifying elevated blood lactate levels as red flags for conditions like sepsis, heart failure and respiratory diseases. It’s also used to measure baby stress levels at the time of birth. In specific emergency scenarios, blood lactate levels can give quick insights into the gravity of trauma or a certain illness, which helps speed up decision-making.

Unusually low or high blood lactate levels can also be an indication of poor health and fitness. For example, if you’re on a diet or a regular exercise routine, or on a route to recovery, you could have a higher chance of developing a high blood lactate concentration.

Athletes use blood lactate monitoring both to check on their overall health and fitness, and also to better understand and enhance their performance. By pinpointing the lactate threshold, the point where lactate production exceeds removal, personalised training regimens are crafted for enhanced endurance. This can help reduce overexertion and overtraining. Using Blood lactate to inform training thresholds makes your training bespoke. When fitting training around busy work/life schedules it means that training is as efficient as possible, giving you the most bang for your buck.

Finally, blood lactate testing in scientific studies helps us better understand the human body, fitness, exercise and overall health. This can help us develop remedies and medications for lactic acidosis, and for enhancing physical performance.