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Blood lactate and ventilatory thresholds in wheelchair athletes with tetraplegia and paraplegia

journal contribution
posted on 2015-03-16, 14:25 authored by Christof LeichtChristof Leicht, Katy Griggs, J. Lavin, Keith TolfreyKeith Tolfrey, Vicky Goosey-TolfreyVicky Goosey-Tolfrey
Purpose: The purpose of this study was to analyse the influence of spinal cord injury level on blood lactate (BLa) and ventilatory thresholds. Methods: Ten athletes with tetraplegia (TETRA) and nine athletes with paraplegia (PARA) performed a graded wheelchair propulsion treadmill exercise step test to exhaustion. The aerobic and anaerobic BLa thresholds, the ventilatory threshold and the respiratory compensation point (RCP) were determined. Results: The BLa thresholds were determined in 34 of 38 cases, ventilatory thresholds and RCPs in 31 of 38 cases. The anaerobic BLa threshold (76 ± 7 % V ̇ O 2 peak) and the RCP (77 ± 8 % V ̇ O 2 peak) did not differ significantly from each other (P = 0.92), with a coefficient of variation of 4.8 ± 3.4 % between thresholds. All other thresholds differed significantly from each other (P < 0.05). Thresholds expressed as the percentage of peak oxygen uptake did not differ between TETRA and PARA (P > 0.05) despite altered breathing in TETRA, which included a higher ventilatory equivalent for oxygen and a lower tidal volume. Conclusion: Measuring BLa leads to a higher threshold determination rate compared with ventilatory data and the anaerobic BLa threshold can be used to predict the RCP. The altered breathing in TETRA does not seem to have a pronounced effect on the ventilatory threshold or the RCP. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

Funding

We thank the Great Britain Wheelchair Rugby Ltd. and British Wheelchair Basketball for their support.

History

School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

European Journal of Applied Physiology

Volume

114

Issue

8

Pages

1635 - 1643

Citation

LEICHT, C. ... et al, 2014. Blood lactate and ventilatory thresholds in wheelchair athletes with tetraplegia and paraplegia. European Journal of Applied Physiology, 114 (8), pp. 1635 - 1643.

Publisher

© Springer-Verlag

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2014

Notes

This article is closed access.

ISSN

1439-6319

Language

  • en