REF-032 · Hill & Lupton, 1923 [CORRECTED year and journal] · QJM: An International Journal of Medicine · Paper

Hill & Lupton 1923: muscular exercise, lactic acid and the supply and utilization of oxygen

Foundational work

Cweak evidence: opinion or lab dataMeasured on a mixed groupWritten before October 2026, being re-checked

Overview

Hill and Lupton's 1923 QJM paper is one of the founding documents of exercise physiology: it deals with oxygen supply and utilisation during muscular exercise and the role of lactic acid, and introduced the concepts of maximal oxygen uptake and oxygen debt that later work built on.

No abstract is available for a 1923 paper; the summary here is historical context, not a checked reading of the text. The related analysis of athletic records is reviewed with hindsight by Burnley et al. 2025 REF-033.

Key Findings

Historical context, not checked against the paper: introduces oxygen debt / oxygen deficit and the notion of a maximal oxygen intake
Historical context: an early model of aerobic and anaerobic contributions to exercise, with lactic acid as the marker of the anaerobic part
Later formalised by many others; the modern critical-power and threshold concepts trace part of their lineage here (see REF-033 for the sourced review)

Practical Application

Historical reference for explaining where the aerobic/anaerobic distinction, VO2max and oxygen debt come from; it carries no training prescription and no numbers to quote. When an athlete asks why intensity is periodised by energy system, this is the origin story — the evidence for any specific practice lives in the modern entries, not here.

Limitations

No abstract or full text checked; a 1923 paper whose methods are primitive by modern standards; the entry is context, not evidence.
How this entry was checked and changed
Content correction 2026-09-27
Overview "Hill's seminal 1925 Nature paper" -> the entry's DOI resolves to Hill & Lupton 1923, QJM (as the corrected Journal line already said); Overview aligned.
Marked all summary statements as historical context not checked against the paper (no abstract exists); Limitations added; practical text no longer implies the paper "underpins polarized training".