How could the difference between living at elevation and owning a tent ever be detected outside of raiding ones home? In addition, one tent company claims a 3% or greater improvement. A pretty good advantage over sea level folks.
"How much is 3%? Just imagine outdistancing your opponents: …by 12 meters per lap on a standard outdoor running track, …more than 50 yards in a mile run, …one and a half body lengths in a 100-meter swim, …more than one kilometer in a 35k cycling time trial, or …more than 3/4 mile in a marathon!
Easily the difference between winning and losing!"
From wikipedia:
"The ethics of the use of these devices by athletes has been discussed by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), which claimed that it could be equivalent to blood doping and therefore they should be banned; however, on September 16, 2006, Dick Pound of the WADA announced that “…the overwhelming consensus of our heatlh, medicine and research committees – was that, at this time, it is not appropriate to do so,” No explanation was given as to how WADA would have enforced a ban.’
I wonder how easy it is to raise your red blood cell count with elevation and if you could ever reach the level of an EPO user or someone using blood transfusions. (IE 49.9)
it s very hard to rise the level of red blood cell with altitude. there is only a % of the population that react to altitude and some are no responder.
The 3% claim is the BEST senario possible and often wont be acheive… it sure wont come close to Epo effect.
As a exemple, i have a hematocrite of about 42.5 and it s pretty consistant, the highest i have ever reach is 44…pretty far from the 50 limit…
If not everyone responds, do you think for some climbing Everist that it might as well be done in two days rather than the whole up, down, up down, progression? Also, how do most people moving to altitude ever adjust to train? Is 1-3% that significant?
you are talking about 2 different thing. Climbing everest, the base camp is a 17 000 feet…way way way higher than any athlete trainign camp or altitude tent. A that altitude, there is any different adaptation that will help them go up but would not be good for a athlete performance as he would not substain any training quality that high. A night at that altitude and to camp 2-3 4 20 000 feet to 27 000 is extremly costly on your body and not wanted for a athlete. But for a climber, it would be extremly dangerous to try to go up without adaptation…
When a athlete move t altitude, for exemple boulder at 5400 feet. they start by reducing there training load and slowly increase the load as the adaptation occure. Mostly everyone will have positive effect but wont necessarly be showed in term of hematocrit. And yes, the 1 to 3 % that can be gain is huge… but every athlete is very different…
i should have said, everyone will have reaction and adaptation to altitude, but it does translate directly to better performance, only in a few athletes…
You have to be careful when dealing with blood chemistry and only reading the “end result”. The nervous system has a role to play in this. There are many studies done in the past that show little to no blood chemistry changes but still have performance improvements. We’ve had many athletes go through altitude training and many of them do not get the blood chemistry increases often associated with altitude training. However, almost all individuals or athletes have performance benefits from doing so.
Peak Centre for Human Performance
www.peakcentre.ca
research is getting there but so far no real specifics have come out. Some are calling it “responders” and “non-responders”. As coaches and sport scientists, we’ve seen the results, just not sure what is causing the performance gains. Some countries also use these this as a modality for medical issues such as asthma, high blood pressure etc… Feedback from athletes with asthma is very positive. Again, the exact reason for this is not known.
Peak Centre for Human Performance
www.peakcentre.ca
good point jack. Some of the older systems using chambers or tents often had this issue to contend with. Some of the athletes we’ve worked with commented that these units would make it more difficult to recover. However, the new intermittent systems do not create this problem. In fact, intermittent sport athletes comment how well they do recover.
Peak Centre for Human Performance
www.peakcentre.ca