The Effects of Low O2 on Muscle Function

The idea that low O2 evokes high lactate is extrapolating the phenomenon seen with lactobacteria fermenting milk in the absence of air to the functioning of human muscles. They had these interesting theories about how this happened, about how during intense exercise you could exercise so hard that no oxygen is getting to your muscle. But it's really neither of these things because they thought that if you exercise hard enough at a certain point your muscles were just going to start using energy anaerobically as opposed to aerobic like it was like a switch or something like a binary state. And if we know for a fact now that it's not, but for a long time they assume that that