am considering renting a tent to train for one june HIM and one july IM race at approx. sea level.
i also live at sea level.
Any advice? Good or bad experience with this?
how long do i need in the tent prior to the race and when should i taper off the tent?
am pretty sure this will be worth it, just looking for feedback.
am pretty sure this will be worth it
I’m pretty sure you are wrong. So is science.
"The study, which was published in the January issue of the Journal of Applied Physiology, involved 16 well-trained cyclists, who spent a total of eight weeks at a training centre on the French-Swiss border. For four of those weeks, they spent 16 hours a day in “hypoxic” rooms in which the effective altitude could be adjusted. Ten rooms were kept at 3,000 metres above sea level, while the other six were kept at less than 1,200 metres. Neither the athletes nor the scientists responsible for testing knew which rooms were which, and the athletes were unable to guess at the end of the study whether they’d been living “high” or “low.”
Shockingly, the researchers were unable to find any differences, either in blood measurements like hemoglobin mass or in cycling performance, between the two groups either during or after the training period. “It was a surprise to us,” Dr. Lundby admits."
Read the article.
your link is bad. Also, one study is not the end all be all. Their subject totals were 6 for the control group and 10 for the altitude group, hardly a large N=
Link fixed. Go read the article.
Read the news article as well as the first page of the actual article in JAP (its all I had access to here at home). My point still stands. Oh, and the swimming article has flaws that even a journalist can point out.
Not sure where this is going. I was just trying to save the OP some disposable income. But:
Alex Hutchinson is not a journalist.He does, however hold a Ph.D in physics from Cambridge. He is a sports physiologist who writes for the G&M. Please feel free to send him your thoughts on why you think the experiment’s sample size is problematic.
Please feel free to post links to published, peer reviewed studies, how ever small the ‘N’ that favor LHTL.
Ok, got access through my university library so I read the JAP article. My critiques:
1- they graphed absolute VO2max instead of relative. From that it seemed as if there was a wide caliber of athletes…but then again without knowing ml/kg/min, its hard to say.
2- Total training time was not documented, only the percent of time at percent of intensities
3- Nutrition wasn’t controlled
4- Did the triathletes SBR or just B during the 8 wk period? How long were the training bouts?
5- Where did the athletes train? Also, HR drift makes for using HR to monitor intensity over a long training bout quite poor. Why not have the athletes train in a lab while monitoring VO2? Or even wattage while on the road?
Thats it for now…
Hi Empire Tri Guy,
To answer your questions, I recommend using the tent starting as soon as possible and for as many nights as possible before your event, including the night before. Basically start now, and sleep in it every night.
My experience is that I take 2 weeks to acclimatize to sleeping in the tent. After that I start performing better, including training harder, which I think helps improve my performance beyond the aerobic performance increases I expected due simply to my adaptation to altitude.
For me, the altitude acclimatization seems to mostly disappear within about 2 weeks after stopping sleeping in the tent. I feel like detraining (back to baseline) take me a few weeks more.
For me it’s worth about a 5 to 10% increase in FTP, backed up by my usual power files but admittedly not rigorously scientific.
Hope this helps,
Save your money! Many gimmicks out there trying to limit the amount of O2 you take in as well to “aid” in training.
Long and short of it is that there are a ton of variables which lead to difficulty studying such devices. Many have been pointed out already, however I might add that there was no “placebo” group in the study mentioned nor a control group to compare to. I have spent the last 3 days lecturing on ergogenic aids in Ex Phys. Just like many supplements on the market, companies selling these “performance enhancers” can make any claim they want without backing them up with (real) proof.
In most cases, hemoglobin is 97-98% saturated with oxygen, not likely to get much greater. You would likely be able to increase the amount of O2 which dissolves in your blood may increase by around 15 ml/L of blood (due to the increase in partial pressure). If you consider 7 liters of blood per individual and a normal individual can transport about 205 ml/L, you are really looking at a MAXIMUM increase of around 5% (and you are not likely to be 100% saturated ever). In reality, the lungs are overdeveloped for what we need them to do. Unless we can increase plasma volume or increase number of heme/liter of blood, you won’t see much benefit for increasing the oxygen. You can use your judgement on whether to find methods of increasing those!
Cheers-
In addition, Money can much easier buy you speed in terms of Aerodynamics. Unless you have a terrific position and the best aero gear, I’d spend the money that way first. Just my humble opinion of course.
A point of hypoxic living is to stimulate HIF into upregulating EPO and EPO-R, which will in turn produce more red cells. It has little to do with trying to increase SaO2%
Possibly with hypoxic living, but OP specified to train in. I am assuming he will not be spending 20 hours a day in the tent. Still, very little evidence supports long term increases in Hg levels by living in such tents.
Training in hypoxic environment and living in normoxic? well thats just silly…
A point of hypoxic living is to stimulate HIF into upregulating EPO and EPO-R, which will in turn produce more red cells. It has little to do with trying to increase SaO2%
+1
the point isn’t to increase saturation, it’s to increase red count
am considering renting a tent to train for one june HIM and one july IM race at approx. sea level.
i also live at sea level.
Any advice? Good or bad experience with this?
how long do i need in the tent prior to the race and when should i taper off the tent?
am pretty sure this will be worth it, just looking for feedback.
go to pubmed and do some reasearch yourself. Shouldn’t take long. Who are you going to listen to on this board? ARe you really going to take advice from annonymous user names on a forum?
If there was sufficient scientific evidence suggesting there is a long term increase RBC due to hypoxic living, don’t you think it would be illegal? The reason EPO and blood doping (both artificial means of increasing RBC) are illegal is because they work! Have you seen any scientific evidence suggesting hypoxic living can increase RBC? Especially if the individual is not living in the environment 24/7? If a pro claimed their increase in RBC was due to hypoxic living, I think the BS flag would be thrown. Again, just my 2 cents.
But yes, one of the other posters is correct. The OP should do their own research and decide if the juice is worth the squeeze.
It doesn’t matter what I think, it matters what I know (also, what I can cite):
“Some athletes use altitude training as a means of increasing their red blood cell count and haemoglobin concentration. This is because the low levels of oxygen at altitude stimulate the bone marrow to produce more red blood cells.”
http://www.medicdirectsport.com/athletictraining/default.asp?step=4&pid=439
Dave,
Money may not be an issue to you but you are better off paying for three top and very expensive and very good coaches for each discipline. Knowing what I know about you, paying for that should just be from loose change in your pocket. Of course, an altitude tent is chump change too but if you really want to go hypoxic, do it the hard way.
.
It works, if you get it all right… The benefit you are trying to do is increase Hematocrit. I blood test pre and post tent cycles and have always seen benefits. I live at altitude so I am not in it all the time. Too much is not always better, you don’t always recover well in the tent. Research shows there are responders and non-responders, so it doesn’t work for everyone. Plus many factors are unknown and you can hurt your performance as ez as you can increase performance. I have seen good results and know others who have also but would bet that many see no results.
Yes, there are multiple sources out there. Some support, some do not. As I suggested before, the amount of time spent in the environment is important. A few studies cited in Levine 2002: “Although short-duration exposures of less than 10 h for less than 3 weeks do not raise red cell mass in the Australian experience (Ashenden et al., 1999a, 1999b, 2000), Finnish investigators have been able to demonstrate increases in red cell mass (using the same technique, carbon monoxide rebreathing, as the Australian investigators using shorter-term exposures) with 16 h of hypoxia/night for 4 weeks (Laitinen et al., 1995; Rusko et al., 1999).” however, upon returning to normal pressures, “there is a suppression of erythropoietin (Faura et al., 1969; Jelkman, 1992; Richalet et al., 1993; Gunga et al., 1996; Levine and Stray-Gundersen, 1997;Chapman et al., 1998), a dramatic reduction in iron turnover and bone marrow production of erythroid cell lines (Huff et al., 1951; Reynafarje et al., 1959), and a marked decrease in red cell survival time (Reynafarje et al., 1959). This increase in red cell destruction with suppression of EPO levels has been termed neocytolysis and has been observed under other conditions of a relative increase in oxygen content (Alfrey et al., 1996a, 1996b, 1997; Rice and Alfrey, 2000; Rice et al., 2001). Both the rapid ubiquitination and destruction of HIF-1a and neocytolysis (which may be its clinical manifestation) may compromise the ability of short-duration, intermittent hypoxic exposures to induce a sustained increase in the red cell mass.”
Again, just my two cents. I am sure we could continue to go back and forth and offer contradicting positions, but frankly I don’t see the point. My opinion is that the OP should critically look at the research (not on websites, but actual research) and make an informed decision.