Is it a bird..a plane..

Nope its a runner! Unfortunately the Olympics are coming to a close and there truly was some incredible displays of athleticism shown including Mo Farah's defense of both 10,000m and 5,000m Olympic titles to secure his place in the history books. In this article I'm going to look at one of the training methods many top long-distance athletes employ to maximise performance- Altitude training. To many of us altitude training is just running around on top of mountains and jobs a good'un but in reality it is not so simple as that. So before I explain to you the effects of altitude training, I will first go over the how athletes use altitude to maximise their training.

Traditionally athletes adopted the live high, train high approach to altitude training as the idea of as you train at high altitude (under hypoxic conditions) your body adapts to the conditions and your performance increases however studies have shown that this performance is not transferred when back at sea level as the lower intensity in training offsets the adaptations. Therefore whilst performance at altitude is increased the LHTH approach is not effective for low altitude competition. It is for this reason that many athletes who use altitude training are adopting the live high, train low method. This results in your body adapting to hypoxic conditions whilst the athlete being able to maintain intensity in training and the adaptations are carried into the performance.

So how exactly do our bodys adapt to altitude that makes us more effective at endurance activities?
Well, with less oxygen in the air the body responds to increase the bloods oxygen carrying capacity.
It does this by raising concentrations of the hormone Erythropoietin (EPO), this causes increased red blood cell concentration and haemoglobin mass. However these effects only last one to two weeks before haemoglobin mass returns to the normal level.

Altitude training is not all sunshine, daisies and gold medals however. There are associated negative effects of altitude training such as depressed immune function stemming from reduced blood flow to skeletal tissue where many cells involved in immune response are produced.

Thanks for reading this weeks blog, hope you found it interesting.

Written by Chris Morgan :)

Sources: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1332514/
https://www.brighton.ac.uk/sesame/research-projects/predicting-altitude-training-response.aspx






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