Despite the popularity of measuring blood lactic acid concentrations, many of the common variations in technique have not been evaluated. The purposes of this study were to: 1) establish the relationship between plasma and blood lactate concentrations, 2) determine the inter-analyzer reliability, and 3) assess the stability of lactate concentration in blood stored for up to one week. Blood was sampled from 26 volunteers before exercise, at 80% of estimated maximum heart rate, and 5 minutes after a treadmill run to exhaustion. Inter-machine reliability was tested between two Yellow Springs Instruments analyzers with buffer treated with a lysing agent and between two without. Blood lactate levels at all three levels could be predicted from plasma with R2 > .95. Correlations between duplicates on the same machine were greater than .96 for blood and .97 for plasma. In the worst cases, between duplicate differences and between machine differences were 2%. Lactate in stored blood was in some cases significantly different after 24 hours of storage. Moderate and high lactate concentrations in plasma were not significantly altered after 2 days of storage.
