One coach said that after a year of working with an athlete, he could estimate the threshold to within a couple of beats using a heart rate monitor. It won't take a year or a week. It can be done in an hour and then verified in a half hour during a scheduled workout. When it is over you will know a lot more than what the heart rate monitor will tell you by itself. Measuring maximum lactate production is an excellent and easy way to assess the anaerobic system .
Speed requires that muscles produce energy as quickly as possible.
Thus, at high speeds, athletes produce large amounts of lactate very quickly. As an athlete gets nearer to a major competition, the anaerobic system should be trained more intensely so that the athlete is ready for the important race. While many athletes spend a lot of their training trying to limit production of lactate and shuttle it quickly from one muscle to another, they also train to produce as much lactate as possible at race time. So for peak performance athletes train their bodies to simultaneously produce large amounts of lactate in one energy system and limit it in another. We call this the Lactate Training Paradox .