Schedule:
100km bike race next sunday(6 th)
HIM(montreal 12th)
This week will be huge in volume…
If I give blood this wednesday, is my performance(both training and racing) will be affected?
And how much?
thanks
jf
I don’t have an answer for you, but I’m also interested to know the effect of both blood donations and plasma donations. I’m in grad school and some friends of mine love pimping out other grad students for free blood/plasma for their research so they don’t have to pay outrageous prices for it from some company.
http://forum.slowtwitch.com/...tring=blood;#1676426
not sure why his link doesn’t work but there is a thread on this if you search.
I don’t have a scientific answer for you, but think about it from this perspective.
Professional cyclist risk their health and their careers to ADD an extra pint of blood into their system. There are clear physiological and performance benefits to doing so. Wouldn’t it make sense to conclude that REMOVING a pint of blood would result in some kind of performance handicap? It does to me. Your heart is going to have to work a lot harder to make up for the loss of volume of fluid that carries oxygen to your muscles or other vital organs.
You’ve got way too much on the plate to be donating blood at this point. Please do yourself a favour and wait until the off season! Good luck in your races.
Ill keep my blood for me!!!
They will have to wait till Ill be back from IMCOZ…
Thanks
jf
My guess is your performance will be significantly affected. I gave blood 23 days before an IronMan in 2005 and I think that was the reason for my poor performance. In the early miles of the bike, my HR was 20 beats higher than it should have been for the speed I was going, and things went downhil from there.
Ben
The lost volume (plasma) will be replaced in a matter of hours. But red blood cells take on the order of weeks to replenish. The American Red Cross recommends giving blood only once every 8 weeks, so this is an indication of how long this process takes for a normal human. I would imagine training would speed it along somewhat since training stimulates red blood cell production (for example, I’ve raced 5 or 6 weeks after a donation and it seemed normal). But since you’re talking about just a couple weeks, I think you’ll have decreased performance.
Waiting to donate until after your races is a good idea.
I will try to stay away from vampire too!!!
There is one important benefit to giving blood. You become a really cheap drunk.
Hey, we’re in a recession after all.
When this question comes up I always make a pitch for platelet donations rather than whole blood donations. The main performance impact of blood donation comes from loss of red blood cells, which carry oxygen. in platelet donations, blood is taken, separated into its constituents, and after pulling out the platelets, everything else (esp. red cells) is returned. This process is repeated multiple times to produce high platelet yields.
Platelets are in particularly high demand for certain therapies (e.g. cancer/leukemia treatments), and have a short shelf life. A dedicated platelet donation yields many times the amount of platelets that come from a ‘standard’ whole blood donation; this also offers advantages in that it reduces the number of donors whose platelets need to be ‘pooled’ for a platelet transfusion, which is beneficial to patients.
Platelets ‘rebound’ much faster than red blood cells (you can donate as frequently as every two weeks, rather than every 8 weeks for whole blood). This also suggests that any performance impact would be of much shorter duration (although I’ve never noticed any negative impact on training).
Downsides: (i) platelet donations require quite a bit more time (1.5 - 2 hours). (ii) This isn’t something you do at the blood drive at work; normally you’d need to go to a more specialized donor center/blood bank (I do it at the local hospital, trying for one donation per month). Where I donate, they have a selection of DVDs to pass the time, and I normally get a free lunch out of the deal while donating.
Wes B
When this question comes up I always make a pitch for platelet donations rather than whole blood donations.
+2. I have now given over 100 times, and I no longer give whole blood donations, due to the major hit on training. Platelet donations don’t bother me in the slightest, and I can do moderate-hard workouts the day after donating.
Big effect. I was an idiot and did a TTT the day after giving blood. Boy were my teammates pissed. I was totally useless, i.e “Waiit for meeeeeee…:”