Mar

1

I recently was asked a good question: does high altitude resistance training actually work?:

Certainly using oxygen filtering masks works to simulate high altitude training. You may get the same benefits with an oriental exhaust mask (that cuts air intake by about 30%, and I currently use) over the mouth. Moreover, you may put training stress on your lungs by willfully controlling respiration– learn to breathe less oxygen per breath by many means such as through the nose, heating air by holding in the pharynx, diaphragm breathing, filling just the lower lung lobes, & so on.

Yet, the $89 training mask is ingenious. Thanks for the site, however, the company's argument of equality of passive vs. active training holds no water, and this is a lesson for all sports, dance, bedroom, or walk in the park. Having ambled on most of the world's major ranges, active training out-performs passive in myriad physiological gross & microscopic ways, despite studies to the contrary by lazy bone scientists. Isotonic overpowers isometric. Physical doing beats mental rehearsal almost always.

Physical training made easy is grasping there are three techniques to fitness gain: increased weight, repetition or frequency. This is a distillation of every exercise physiology class I ever took, and Joe Wielder's technique to stop getting sand kicked in my face. The best gain for most sports is by increasing weight (resistance), e.g. the ankle weights I'm wearing & 10lb. of books, bills & camera stuffed in my hiking shorts.

The face mask can be said to increase the resistance of respiration. Future elite athletes, I think, will train in underwater gyms like track horses to increase resistance on every square-inch of skin, and later Olympic champs will train on Jupiter (or a simulator) requiring more effort for every muscle fiber to contract. Until then, you may sink your gym set in the shallow end of a swimming pool, and dog paddle with a weight belt between sets.

The resistance trainer will win nearly every time against one who doesn't, whatever the activity. I used to tell competitors that the wire on my tournament racquetball racquet was a coach's antenna.

Russ Sears weighs in:

Altitude training is a lot like life: it is not how you are torn down that matters but how you re-build. What runners have found is that it is the recovery especially sleeping at high altitudes is what build endurance by forcing the body to adapt in the recovery. Hard training in high altitudes is not as much nor as quick and it is close enough to race pace or conditions. The newer mantra is to train low and live high. They achieve this either by stimulated altitude chambers or sleeping tents or by driving down a steep road to train, at least to do the faster harder stuff.

The newest mantra is to use "anti-gravity" treadmills (they hold you up at the waist so the pounding is not as hard). This enables you to train more distance and to increase the turnover and pace beyond a normal race. So the idea is to train "gently" so as to train as much as possible and to also stress neurologically system occasionally beside the muscles.

While Bo certainly could tell us more about the bodies adaptation than I could, the main effect as I understand it is to increase the red blood cells and therefore the bodies ability to carry oxygen and repair damage. This is similar to the effects of EPO, except EPO tends to let your blood turn to sludge and cause heart attacks if you dehydrate too much. The tale tale sign of a drug cheat is to see if they pull out of a meet/race when the weather is hotter than expected. But I can attest that even a trained runner can pass-out from dehydration, as I did last June.


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