“Is altitude the key to unlocking peak performance, or is it just as likely to bury sea-level natives attempting to live and train too high?“
Two weeks ago in the newsletter, Dakotah Lindwurm discussed her travel to Albuquerque for a winter altitude training trip. She and Annie Frisbie are there for over two months, and Kevin Lewis will be joining them for a shorter stint as well.
Those of you who follow other pro runners will be well aware that training at altitude is a common practice, with locations like Boulder and Flagstaff considered hotbeds of U.S. distance running. Most people have a vague notion that altitude training can improve performance, and many will likely also have heard of cases and stories where altitude training “back-fired” and led to negative outcomes. So which is it? Is altitude the key to unlocking peak performance, or is it just as likely to bury sea-level natives attempting to live and train too high? The answer, which may not be very satisfying, is similar to the answer to any question about training….it depends.
The first thing to know is the mechanism by which altitude training can improve performance. No, it is not because there’s “less oxygen in the air” up there. Remember, the same air masses are moving and mixing all around the globe. The difference is the lower atmospheric pressure. This lower pressure in the atmosphere means less pressure to diffuse oxygen from the lungs into the bloodstream. In other words, altitude leads to less oxygen in the bloodstream.
This reduction in oxygen levels in the body, also know as hypoxia, stimulates EPO secretion, which in turn leads to production of red blood cells. Those precious little guys carry oxygen to the working muscles, so having more of them means more oxygen can be delivered, making a higher rate of aerobic metabolism possible. EPO is the most notorious banned substance among endurance athletes, and living at altitude is a safe and legal way to increase it naturally in the body. Score one for altitude training on this front.
So what are the potential downsides, or why can altitude training fail?
First off, the athlete needs to have sufficient iron stores in order to produce the oxygen-carrying red blood cells. Borderline or low iron can mean that the athlete ends up working harder, and getting no beneficial response.
Secondly, training at altitude can lead to lower training intensity. The lower levels of oxygen in the bloodstream limit the muscles’ ability to do sustained work at the same intensity that could be achieved at sea level, so the muscles can in fact get less stimulus, despite the athlete putting forth an equivalent (or even greater) perceived effort. This is the basis for the idea of “live high, train low” training, where the athlete lives at high altitude, but trains at lower elevations, especially for the harder sessions.
The third and final potential downside of altitude training that I will discuss is simply due to athletes over-doing it. This can certainly happen anywhere, but sometimes athletes and/or coaches fail to account for the additional physiological stress of training at altitude. Training stresses, applied properly, can lead to adaptation and improvement. Stacking up excessive stress, without sufficient recovery can lead to staleness or overtraining. And if you dig yourself into a hole at altitude, it can be tough to climb back out.
The last point I will make is that the primary goal of altitude training – red blood cell production – can be impacted by other stimuli. For example, endurance training alone has an effect. Another interesting area of active research revolves around heat training and heat exposure. The phrase “heat is the poor man’s altitude” gets thrown around, and while the two stimuli are not the same, there are certainly some similarities in the physiological responses. The results are mixed on the degree to which heat training stimulates red blood cell production, but there are some clear benefits, and this is a promising area worth exploration.
Ultimately, while it is interesting to look at the research and examine the effects of different approaches, each athlete and person must be considered as an experiment of one. So, as with any change in training, it is important to keep close tabs on how you are feeling and adapting. Bloodwork is certainly helpful in measuring changes objectively. But at the end of the day, athletes can feel whether something is working for them or not.
Chris Lundstrom is the head coach of Minnesota Distance Elite – formerly Team USA Minnesota – which includes some of the top distance runners in the USA, including Annie Frisbie, Dakotah Lindwurm and Joel Reichow.
