What happens to lactate threshold with appropriate training?

Your lactate threshold increases with training and this allows you to run or cycle at greater intensities before lactate accumulates and contributes to fatigue. The increase in your lactate threshold is due to numerous physiological adaptations that occur in the body in response to training that basically result in (i) reduced lactate production for a given pace, (ii) increased ability to clear the lactate that is produced, or (iii) a mixture of both. However, the training that you do must be specifically designed to achieve this. Looking at the example in figure 3, in the untrained state the individual’s lactate threshold occurred at 58% of their VO2max and this corresponded to a running speed of 8.2km/hr. Following 16 weeks of training the test was repeated and their lactate threshold occurred at 80% of their VO2max corresponding to a running speed of almost 12km/hr. Thus improvements in lactate threshold lead to improvements in race pace.