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Comment by atomicnumber3 | Hacker News Reader

If hemoglobin mass is so desirable, why don't all these super athletes simply train at high altitudes and then fly in right before showtime? I know it's probably because cheating is easier, but are athletes really so thoroughly averse to such an ascetic lifestyle that not a single one does it?

(Or is it just that even training in very thin air still doesn't compare to what you can do with cheating? Maybe that's more likely.)

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Altitude camps, ie spending a week or two at altitude, a few weeks before targeted events is very common in cycling. The Canary Island of Tenerife, with roads up to 2300 meters is quite popular in the pre-season thanks to its great climate.

Badly timed such blocks of training, like doing it too close to the event the athlete is peaking for, is detrimental. The body needs time to recuperate.

"Live high, train low"

You do need good oxygen supply during training in order to fully utilize (and grow) the muscles.

Low oxygen (such as found at high altitude) is good for the non-training periods (e.g. during sleep), where it induces a hypoxia-adaptation reaction that consists among others in increased erythropoietin (EPO), resulting in increased hemoglobin, etc.

Apparently it's even more effective to just train at sea level, as you can do so more effectively, you're not out of air all the time, and just sleep and recover at high altitude.

The GDR actually built big training halls/chambers that could be depressurised, in order to achieve some part of that effect.

Article im german [https://taz.de/Museum-im-alten-Trainingsbunker/!5539575/]

The same method is still used by long distance runners. Nowadays, they sleep in a tent (indoors) where the oxygen concentration is artificially reduced to simulate sleeping at a high altitude: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altitude_tent

This literal proposal is impractical for virtually anyone as it requires living in a particular place all the time, but as others have pointed out, some simulation of this technique is extremely common. Sleeping in an artificial low pressure room or hyperbaric chamber is most common, but even the high-altitude camps are not just limited to truly elite athletes. We did this even in high school. My cross-country team was pretty good (we won two California state championships in four years) but still just high schoolers. The school was in Los Angeles but we spent two weeks at the end of every summer before fall semester started camping in the San Bernardino mountains doing two-a-days, usually doing a complete lap around Big Bear lake in the morning and then a shorter, faster run in the afternoon. But it's funny you mention it because I remember the guy who won the individual state championship my freshman year and took second overall in an open 5k I vaguely remember running right before the season started was a student at Rim of the World high school, which is located in Lake Arrowhead and he actually did live at high altitude.

AFAIK they do train at high elevation when possible; it's just that some also cheat too. The U.S. Olympic training center is located at over 6,000ft of elevation, in Colorado Springs, presumably for exactly this reason.

Some sports probably aren't very amenable to this sort of consistently-high-elevation training though — if you play for a specific city's sports team, for example, you're probably going to do most of your training and playtime near that city.

Many of them do. Distance runners often go to Kenya or St. Moritz. But yes, it‘s less effective than the illegal methods.

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