At some point in your athletic life, someone told you that lactic acid causes the burn. A coach, a trainer, a biology teacher, a guy at the gym who seemed like he knew things. The story goes: you push hard, lactic acid builds up, your muscles revolt, you slow down.
This is one of the most persistent myths in sports science. And it has been wrong for a long time.
Lactic Acid Doesn't Exist in Your Body
Here's the first plot twist: lactic acid essentially doesn't exist in human muscle at physiological pH. What your body actually produces during intense exercise is lactate — a different compound — along with hydrogen ions. They're released together, which is why the two got conflated for so long.
But they're not the same thing, and they don't do the same thing.
Lactate? Your body actually uses it. It shuttles lactate to other muscles, the heart, and the liver to use as fuel. Lactate is a feature, not a bug. Elite endurance athletes are better at this than recreational athletes — they clear and recycle lactate more efficiently, which is part of why they can sustain higher outputs for longer.
The real culprit behind the burn is the hydrogen ions.
It's a Chemistry Problem, Not a Fitness Problem
When hydrogen ions accumulate in muscle tissue, they drop the pH — making the environment more acidic. That drop in pH disrupts the chemical reactions that power muscle contractions. Enzymes stop working properly. Calcium signaling gets disrupted. Force output drops.
That sensation — the heavy legs, the burning, the point where your body is screaming at you to stop — is your muscles running out of tolerance for acidity. It is, quite literally, a physics and chemistry problem happening inside your cells.
You're not weak. Your muscles are managing a pH crisis. There's a difference, and it matters.
This reframe is important for athletes. When you hit that wall, the instinct is to interpret it as a mental or physical failure — not tough enough, not fit enough. But what's actually happening is a chemical threshold being crossed. Which means the solution isn't just "push harder." It's managing the chemistry.
The Research That Changed Everything
Exercise physiologist George Brooks spent decades at UC Berkeley untangling this. His "lactate shuttle" hypothesis — now well-established — reframed lactate as a metabolic currency rather than a waste product. His work in the 1980s and 90s is largely why the scientific community stopped blaming lactic acid, even if coaches and gym culture never got the memo.
Since then, researchers have confirmed repeatedly: it's not the lactate. The fatigue, the burn, the performance ceiling — it traces back to hydrogen ion accumulation and the pH drop that follows.
What You Can Actually Do About It
If the problem is acidity, the solution is buffering. Your body has natural buffering systems — primarily bicarbonate in the blood — that work to neutralize hydrogen ions. The question is whether you can enhance that system to push the ceiling higher.
This is where sodium bicarbonate enters the story — the same compound that's been studied as a performance aid since the 1930s, and the same compound behind LactiGo's transdermal delivery system. Applied before and during activity, it reinforces your body's natural buffering capacity, keeping muscle pH higher for longer.
The chemistry is straightforward: more bicarbonate available means more hydrogen ions neutralized, which means the pH drop happens later and recovers faster.
You don't stop producing hydrogen ions. You just get better at handling them.
Which means more reps, more sprints, more second halves where you still have something left.
Not because you got tougher. Because you understood the chemistry.