Physiological determinants of race walking performance in female race walkers

The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between race pace on a 5 km walking performance and velocity at the lactate threshold (V-LT), V̇O₂ at the lactate threshold (V̇O₂-LT), velocity at which blood lactate corresponded to 4 mM level (V-OBLA), V̇O₂ at which blood lactate corresponded to 4 mM level (V̇O₂-OBLA), walking economy (steady state V̇O₂ at a standard velocity) and maximal oxygen uptake (V̇O₂max) in eight female race walkers. A multiple stepwise linear regression analysis was employed to predict the race pace on a 5 km walking performance as dependent variable. Since V-OBLA was highly correlated to 5 km race walking performance (r = 0.94, P < 0.001), it was selected as the first predictor. When V̇O₂max was added to V-OBLA as the second predictor the predictive accuracy increased significantly, but multiple R did not increase significantly by adding variables of walking economy or other parameters as independent variance. As a result, the combination of V-OBLA and V̇O₂max as independent variables accounted for the greatest amount of total variance (97 per cent). It is suggested that blood lactate variable such as V-OBLA can account for a large portion of the variance in race pace on a 5 km walking performance.