They spent 40 years calling it poison.
Now they sell it in a gel.

For 40 years, lactate was the villain.

Coaches called it the burn. The thing that made your legs go heavy and your lungs scream. The waste you had to flush out, suffer through, and train away. If your muscles hurt, lactate got the blame.

Then something great happened. Scientists dug in and proved that old story wrong.

Lactate was never waste. Your body makes it all the time, on purpose. Right now, while you sit and read this, you are making lactate. You make more of it when you push hard, but it never stops. Your heart burns it for fuel. Your brain uses it. Your muscles pass it around like a shared water bottle, from the parts that make it to the parts that need it.

George Brooks at Berkeley describes lactate as three things at once: a fuel, a building block, and a messenger that helps your body handle stress.

And that famous "burn" you feel late in a hard effort? It is not lactate causing pain. In careful lab work, lactate actually helps slow muscle fatigue by protecting the electrical signal that fires your muscle. The old villain, once you look closely, turns out to be quietly on your side.

A scientist told me this in 2009.

I did not learn this from a headline this summer. Back in 2009, a scientist named Iñigo San Millán sat with me and explained these exact things. Lactate as fuel. Lactate as a signal, not a poison. He was already dreaming out loud about whether we could one day feed lactate to the body from the outside.

This is the same man who went on to become the physiologist behind one of the greatest Tour de France champions of our time. So this is not new science, and it is not a fad. Serious people have understood lactate, and wanted this exact thing, for more than fifteen years.

For a long time, almost everyone got lactate wrong, including most of the science world. Only a handful of researchers saw it differently, and they had the courage to say so against the crowd. George Brooks and Iñigo San Millán were two of them. They took years of pushback for it, long before the field caught up.

This is science at its best. Because of decades of careful work like this, we understand the body better than we ever have. This piece is not against science. Science is the reason any of us get better.

A company took that science and built a gel.

The pitch sounds great: lactate is fuel, your body loves it, so eat a little extra and go faster. But look closely, because there are two things the label leaves out.

Start with the science, because it is elegant. Sugar has to squeeze through two crowded doors in your gut: SGLT1 for glucose, GLUT5 for fructose. Push too much through and your stomach protests. Lactate has its own door, a family of carriers called MCT. So on paper, lactate slips in without stealing space from your carbs. That is the honest, beautiful part of the idea.

Now the math. The makers say you need about 15 to 25 grams of lactate per hour for it to do anything real. One gel gives you about 5 grams. To reach the target you would have to eat about four gels every hour. Each gel is also full of sugar, so four gels adds up to around 160 grams of sugar an hour. For most people that is simply too much. The stomach gives out long before the legs do.

Second, and I love this part, the scientist behind it says so himself. In his own published writing, he admits that in this field "almost nothing is yet demonstrated," that it is "an attractive hypothesis, not a confirmed fact," and that the whole area is "still in its infancy."

Read that again. That is not a scientist getting caught. That is a scientist doing his job perfectly. He is testing a bold idea and telling the truth about how early it is. The problem is not him. The problem is what happens after a young, honest idea leaves the lab and gets wrapped in shiny packaging and sold as a finished breakthrough.

We have seen this movie before.

Remember beet juice? A few years ago it was the miracle. The science was real and the researchers were honest: the nitrate in beets helps your body make nitric oxide, which lets your muscles do the same work on a little less oxygen. Good science. But as the studies grew up, something showed up. In weekend athletes there was a small effect. In the fittest, best trained bodies, it often shrank or disappeared.

Then came ketones. Around 2019 this was the Tour de France secret weapon, and a single serving cost more than a nice dinner. Real chemistry: a special fuel that could spare your carbs. Then the careful studies came in, and most showed no boost at all. One well-run test found the ketone group riding slightly slower over a 30 minute effort, not faster.

Now it is lactate's turn. Same shape. Real science, honest researchers, a really interesting idea, and a product on sale long before anyone can promise it works.

What actually makes you faster.

Here is the part I care about most, because this is where performance is actually won and lost. What makes you faster, and what lets you recover and rebuild after, is not one magic molecule. It is how well your whole system is organized.

Can your body make energy cleanly and use it well? Can it switch gears fast: hit the gas when you attack, then hit the brakes and drop into recovery the moment you stop? Can it hold the right amount of tension: tight enough to move well, loose enough to breathe freely? Can it breathe in a way that steers you out of stress and back into calm? And can it adapt: take a brutal day and come back stronger, instead of just surviving it?

That is the real engine. That is your actual ceiling. Not the newest ingredient, but how well you regulate, recover, and rebuild yourself under load, hour after hour, day after day.

The real fuel leak.

Most athletes do not have a fuel shortage. They have a fuel leak. Their system runs half-braced, half-fighting, all day. Shallow breath, tight jaw, quiet stress in the background. That state burns through the fuel you already have long before any gel could top you up.

Fix the leak first. Free the breath, loosen the shoulders, drop the extra tension you carry between efforts. When the body stops paying a hidden tax, the fuel already on board goes much further. That is capacity. And capacity is where every real gain lives.

Ask a sharper question.

Before you chase the next miracle, ask a sharper question. Not "what can I add?" but "how well is my system running what I already have?" Respect the science. Stay curious about the new ideas, because some of them will turn out to matter. And still keep your feet on the ground.

The riders who survive three weeks are not the ones with the fanciest gel. They are the ones whose bodies stay organized, calm, and able to rebuild while everyone around them falls apart.

First move: two minutes before you train.

Try this the next hard session. Sit for two minutes before you clip in. Breathe softly through your nose, longer out than in. Let your shoulders drop. Let your jaw drop. You are not warming up your legs. You are telling your nervous system that this is work, not a threat.

Two minutes is small. It sounds too small to matter. But it changes which "you" starts the workout. A calm system opens more doors, moves more fuel, and holds shape longer. Do that before every hard day for two weeks and you will feel more from what you already have than any new gel can promise.

Your body already knows how to use lactate.
It always did.

The real skill is understanding your own system well enough that you are never the one being sold to.

— Jani