Juan Ribas publicly exposed for the first time his perception of the role of lactate in muscle metabolism in 1992, although he had been working on it since 1986 from the work he performed with ergometries to athletes and experiments with neurons in the central nervous system. According to the author, only cardiologists understood what he was telling them, since they already had some data that the accumulation of lactate and the level of acidosis were not evenly matched in cardiac ischemia problems.

With this article, Juan Ribas intends to show his current perception of the role of lactate in muscle physiology with relevant scientific support. Thus, Ribas will try to free lactate from its unfair fame.

Our organs and tissues (liver, heart, brain, muscles) have a great capacity to consume lactate as metabolic substrate, so the author states that the role of lactate in physiology is beneficial for multiple reasons.

Lactate contributes to the increase of the contractile capacity of the muscular cell, allows the prolongation of working time above a critical level and contributes to the rapid establishment of a level of oxygen consumption more suitable for the power demand.

This is a summary of the article written in Spanish by Juan Ribas under the title “Lactato: De Indeseable A Valioso Metabolito. El Papel De La Producción De Lactato En La Regulación De La Excitabilidad Durante Altas Demandas De Potencia En Las Fibras Musculares”. This article was published in 2010 in Federación Española de Medicina del Deporte (Femede), Volume XXVII – No.  137 – 2010, Pages  211-230

Please click here to download the complete article, written in Spanish:
Lactato: De Indeseable A Valioso Metabolito. El Papel De La Producción De Lactato En La Regulación De La Excitabilidad Durante Altas Demandas De Potencia En Las Fibras Musculares