Training With Less Oxygen
Altitude training & its benefits
After the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, scientists and researches were left wondering why the Track & Field Olympians ran so much slower than they would have expected.
It turned out that due to the high elevation (7,350'), it caused a 7% decrease in their max energy expenditure, causing a reduction in the performance of the athletes.
In high altitude, air molecules have less pressure on them, causing them to be more spread out. This has a direct effect on the availability of oxygen by decreasing the amount of oxygen in the air.
Benefits
Athletes take advantage of this by training at high altitude locations. Due to the lack of oxygen, your liver increases its production of erythropoietin. Erythropoietin is a protein that increases and enlarges the red blood cells count. Because red blood cells help transfer oxygen to your muscles and organs, this process would ultimately increase your body’s efficiency at pumping oxygen to the organs that need it.
Nowadays, there are facilities that reduce the oxygen level within the facility so that athletes are able to live inside and adapt to lower oxygen levels while training outside where oxygen levels are more significant. This allows athletes to accumulate higher red blood cells while not treating their bodies too harshly.
“Live High Train Low”
However, there are also specific areas that are high in elevation that many athletes train at so they are taking advantage of this phenomenon — places such as Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and many other areas.
Why train at altitude?
Many high-performance runners train and live at altitude so that their bodies naturally adapt to the lack of oxygen by increasing their blood cell count. This means that when they race at a lower elevation, their increased red blood cells benefit them due to their efficiency at delivering blood to their organs and muscles.
This is one key factor why athletes from Kenya and Ethiopia are dominant in the distance and endurance side. It allows them to gain a competitive advantage when racing and often will enable them to get the gold in the races when it comes down to strength.
Athletes such as Eliud Kipchoge and Kenenisa Bekele and many more benefit from their high elevation training land.
Going straight from sea level to high elevation can be dangerous if not planned accordingly. For many people, it can cause sickness. After the erythropoietin starts to be released, and more red blood cells are produced, you will slowly feel better.
This is the reason why people feel sick and tired when climbing Mt. Everest; they are not acclimated to the lack of oxygen within their body; therefore their bodies are not able to deliver enough oxygen to their organs and muscles.
