Authors
Yupeng Shen, Xinnuo Zou, Xiaotong Chen, Xiaobin Wu
Published in
Annals of medicine. Volume 58. Issue 1. Pages 2737006. Epub Oct 09, 2026.
Abstract
Incremental lactate testing is widely used to characterize the lactate-velocity relationship in swimmers, but the highest-intensity stages increase testing burden and may be difficult to execute consistently.
To determine whether a five-stage protocol can be reduced to three stages without materially changing seven lactate-derived velocity indices, and whether model complexity affects reconstruction.
Ninety highly trained swimmers completed a 5 × 200 m freestyle incremental test at 80-100% of 200 m personal-best performance. Stage-4 and stage-5 lactate values were reconstructed from the first three stages using participant-specific linear extrapolation and a long short-term memory (LSTM) model. Seven lactate-derived indices were recalculated and compared with full-protocol values using limits of agreement, typical error, ICC(A,1) and equivalence testing.
Lactate reconstruction was inaccurate for both models, yet v@Exp-Dmax showed close agreement with the full protocol (bias -0.008 m·s-1; limits of agreement -0.023 to +0.007 m·s-1; ICC 0.988) and met the pre-specified equivalence criterion. The other six indices did not meet equivalence. LSTM provided no advantage over linear extrapolation, and reconstructed v@Exp-Dmax preserved the performance-association pattern observed with the full protocol.
A three-stage protocol may support lower-burden longitudinal monitoring of v@Exp-Dmax, but protocol simplification is index-specific and does not establish physiological threshold validity.
PMID:
42855966
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 10 Oct 2026.
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