Understanding Your Metabolic Metrics

Your guide to the key physiological markers measured in our INSCYD Metabolic & Lactate Test

When you complete your metabolic profiling session at Proactive Physical Health, your personalised report will include a range of advanced physiological metrics. Each of these offers valuable insight into how your body produces energy, how fatigue develops, and how you can optimise your training for maximum performance. By using the INSCYD software platform, we can measure these metrics accurately and transform them into clear, actionable recommendations.

Proactive Physical Health

VO2max // The size of the engine

VO₂max represents your maximum aerobic capacity — essentially, the size of your “engine.” Whether you compete in short, explosive events or long endurance efforts, VO₂max is a key predictor of performance across almost every sport.

Despite some misconceptions, VO₂max is not limited by genetics alone. It responds strongly to training and can improve significantly with the right approach. Because it adapts quickly, regular monitoring is essential.

When we test your VO₂max, our analysis software allows us to:

Compare how high-intensity training and endurance work influence VO₂max
Evaluate the effect of specialised nutrition strategies
Understand how VO₂max interacts with fat oxidation and carbohydrate combustion

Proactive Physical Health

VLAmax // Elite Coaches secret weapon disclosed

VLamax (maximum lactate accumulation rate) reflects the power of your anaerobic glycolytic system. It can be interpreted from two perspectives:

A low VLamax increases your anaerobic threshold, improves fat combustion, and enhances recovery from hard efforts.
A high VLamax boosts sprinting ability, breakaway power, and short-burst performances — crucial in moments that decide races.

VLamax is one of the most impactful metrics for shaping training. Historically used only by professional teams and national federations, it is now available to everyday athletes. Knowing your VLamax helps you connect the dots between training, physiology, and race performance.

As Dan Lorang — coach of IRONMAN World Champion Jan Frodeno — explains:
“You really know what to work on if you know the VLamax.”

By understanding your VLamax, we can design training programmes to optimise:

Fat combustion
Carbohydrate sparing
Anaerobic threshold (FTP)
Recovery from hard efforts
Sprint and attack performance

Proactive Physical Health

Lactate accumulation & recovery

Sports such as football, cycling, Hyrox, and rugby require frequent high-intensity bursts. Each sprint, attack, or surge creates lactate accumulation — and your ability to recover from these spikes is crucial.

Athletes with strong lactate clearance and recovery kinetics can perform repeated efforts with less fatigue, giving them a decisive edge.

These abilities are highly trainable. By understanding your individual accumulation and recovery patterns, we can help you:

Improve lactate clearance
Enhance performance in repeated-effort sports
Train more effectively for high-intensity intervals
See measurable improvements within weeks

Proactive Physical Health

Anaerobic Threshold

Anaerobic threshold refers to the highest intensity at which your body can maintain a metabolic “steady state.” It is often called critical power, threshold power, or functional threshold power (FTP).

Traditional methods of estimating threshold rely on population averages or empirical lab patterns, which may not reflect an individual’s physiology. They also fail to explain why an athlete’s threshold is at its current level.

Our testing determines anaerobic threshold using its true physiological definition:
the maximum intensity where lactate production equals lactate combustion.

Testing your threshold this way allows you to:

Understand how your physiology directly influences your threshold
Reduce the standard error of measurement to below 3%
See exactly how improving a single metric (e.g., VO₂max or VLamax) will raise your threshold

This provides a precise, personalised foundation for targeted training.

Proactive Physical Health

Economy // Decrypting the speed hack

Most athletes have heard of running economy, cycling economy, or swimming economy — yet few understand or measure it correctly.

Economy is the amount of energy required to maintain a specific speed or power output.

Two athletes may have identical VO₂max values, but the one with better economy will always be faster.

Economy is one of the most important parameters in free-motion sports such as running and swimming.

By analysing your economy, we can:

Assess how a given training plan changes your movement efficiency
Monitor improvements over time and integrate them into your programme
Evaluate the effect of equipment (e.g., shoes, wetsuits, bike position) on energy cost

This gives you unprecedented clarity into how effectively you convert energy into speed.

Proactive Physical Health

Fat combustion

Fat combustion plays a central role in endurance performance, especially in running and triathlon. Using INSCYD’s modelling system, we can measure and track your fat-burning ability with high precision.

Why this matters:

Fat combustion ability varies significantly between athletes
It also changes within the same athlete depending on training phase
High fat oxidation helps preserve carbohydrate stores and delay fatigue
Knowing your FatMax Zone allows you to target fat-metabolism training with maximum efficiency

Understanding your fat combustion profile enables better endurance performance and smarter nutrition strategies.

Proactive Physical Health

Carbohydrates combustion

Carbohydrate combustion refers to how quickly your body burns carbohydrate at different intensities. This metric is crucial because it tells you:

How much fuel you need during training or racing
When you are likely to deplete glycogen stores
Whether your pacing or nutrition plan is sustainable

Carbohydrate utilisation can be improved — but it must be practiced with the right training and fuelling plan.

Traditional lab methods that rely solely on gas exchange often misjudge carbohydrate use, especially when nutrition status varies. Lactate data must be incorporated for accurate measurement.

With our software, we combine lactate production with energy-system modelling, giving you an accurate picture of carbohydrate combustion where it matters most:

On the track
On the climb
On the field
In real-world performance settings

Understanding Your Metabolic Metrics

VO2max // The size of the engine

VLAmax // Elite Coaches secret weapon disclosed

Lactate accumulation & recovery

Anaerobic Threshold

Economy // Decrypting the speed hack

Fat combustion

Carbohydrates combustion

Client Reviews