We are starting to investigate blood lactate testing here at the clinic.

Here is why.

A few years ago, a client came in who had recently gone through a full workup at a very well-regarded facility. Wealthy, high-achieving, mid-50s, looked the part. Every test came back clean. Except one.

His visceral fat was shockingly high.

Visceral fat is the fat that surrounds your organs. It is not the fat you can see or pinch. It is the fat you cannot. And in someone who appeared, by every other measure, to be in excellent shape, it made no sense.

I kept thinking about it.

My suspicion was that this man, as a classic high-achiever, was never truly at rest. Always on. Always moving. Always producing. And I wondered whether that constant state of low-grade exertion was showing up somewhere we hadn't looked yet.

So we tested his blood lactate.

When the body exerts itself, it releases lactate into the bloodstream. Measuring it at rest gives you a picture of how hard the body is actually working, even when it appears to be doing nothing. This test is typically reserved for elite endurance athletes. We had never used it this way before.

His resting lactate levels were double what they should have been.

What that tells us is that his body was consistently pushing past the aerobic energy system and running in the anaerobic system instead. That distinction matters for one specific reason. The anaerobic system does not use fat for fuel. Only the aerobic system does.

A body that never slows down enough to run aerobically is a body that cannot burn fat efficiently. Which may explain, very precisely, why the fat was accumulating exactly where it was.

This is the kind of invisible block that standard testing will never catch.

As we continue to evolve the genMAX score, we are looking for more data points like this one. Metrics that reveal what is actually happening beneath the surface, not just what the body looks like from the outside.

I am starting to test my own resting lactate levels today.

That is where this begins.

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