A Personal Biography of a Physiological Misnomer: The Anaerobic Threshold

In 1973 Wasserman, Whipp, Koyal, and Beaver published a groundbreaking study titled "Anaerobic threshold and respiratory gas analysis during exercise". At that time, respiratory gas analysis and laboratory computers had evolved such that more advanced respiratory exercise physiology studies were possible. The initial publications from this group on the onset of anaerobic metabolism in cardiac patients, the first breath-by-breath VO₂ system, the first description of the anaerobic threshold, and then later new methods to detect the anaerobic threshold have been and continue to be highly cited. In fact, their 1973 anaerobic threshold paper is the sixth and their 1986 paper is the second most cited paper ever published in the Journal of Applied Physiology. The anaerobic threshold concept has also generated>5500 publications with the rates increasing over time. The publication of two papers that help to refute the "anaerobic" explanation for this phenomenon had no effect on the rates of citations of the original anaerobic threshold papers or the number of anaerobic threshold papers published since. Thus, despite now substantial evidence refuting the proposed anaerobic mechanisms underlying this phenomenon, these papers continue to be highly influential in the discipline of exercise physiology and, perhaps even more explicitly, clinical exercise physiology.