The Effects of Training at Altitude
We’ve all heard the phrase “the sky's the limit," but what if training at a higher elevation actually helps in athletic endeavors? While something as simple as training location may seem straightforward enough, there has been continued research on performance benefits, technological advances, and practical applications of training at high elevation levels. What does altitude training involve, and more importantly– what are its implications to the sporting world?
History of Altitude Training
To truly get a full understanding of what altitude training is, we first must get an idea of how it came to be. The practice originated in the early 1800s when the unusual hobby of hot air ballooning became popular. On these voyages, balloonists would note the physical limits of the human body when going above 13,000 feet. 15,000 feet was seen as the “death zone,” in which oxygen levels dropped low enough to kill animals– and even people. Yet, human nature defied the labeled limits of altitude training. People began to compete to reach the greatest heights without suffering the fatal effects from a lack of oxygen.
Fast forward over a century, and studies have found that training in an oxygen deficit may actually benefit athletes. The first primary example of this took place at the 1968 Olympics. Located in Mexico City, which sits at 7,350 feet, the 1968 Olympics holds the record for highest location elevation in Olympic history.
The biggest takeaway from the 1968 games was how bipolar the results in the track and field events were. Despite the high elevation, world records were set in all sprint events, including the long jump, triple jump, and the breaking of the 10-second barrier by James Ray Hines. While success was seen in the sprints and jumps, there was a slaughter in the long-distance events. The gold medal time in the 5,000 meters race was 17 seconds slower than the year before and the 10,000 meters race went over a minute longer than its predecessor. With such polarizing results from these Olympic Games, researchers quickly resolved that the leading factor in these results was the elevation of Mexico City.
Altitude Training: Benefits and Drawbacks
Altitude training, also known as hypoxic training, involves an athlete training in a place that stimulates the lack of oxygen for the athlete. It is important to note that altitude training works best for athletes in sports that focus on endurance, such as running, swimming, and biking.
The typical stance on the height that is classified as “altitude” is 2,000 meters, or 6,500 feet. At this height, the athlete will begin to experience the symptoms that come with high elevation, most prominently the lower air pressure and the lack of oxygen levels in the air. These symptoms prompt the body to experience many benefits, including:
Increased Red Blood Cell Production: The body is forced to become more effective at moving oxygen, so it immediately begins to create erythropoietin, the hormone that stimulates the growth of red blood cells.
Increased VO2 Max: VO2 Max is how efficiently your body works to use oxygen between your respiratory, muscular, and cardiovascular systems while exercising. With less oxygen at higher altitudes, the body is forced to become more efficient with homeostasis.
Enhanced Respiratory and Cardiovascular Efficiency: With lower amounts of oxygen, the body improves features such as lung capacity to breathe more air, capillary volume to send more blood to muscle in the body, and boosting the amount of blood that is sent through the body.
Now this all sounds great, but what does this really mean?
Taking a look at recent successful endurance athletes, it can be observed that altitude training has most certainly paid off. For example, training partners from Provo, Utah, Conner Mantz and Clayton Young just recently qualified for the 2024 Paris Olympics. And where do they train? The mountains of Utah (6,100 feet above sea level on average). If we look at the sport of collegiate cross country, the team that has had the most success over the past couple of years by far has been Northern Arizona University, who have either won or were runners-up a whopping eight times in a row (6-time winners, 2-time runners-up). Could it be a coincidence that Northern Arizona University is located in Flagstaff, Arizona, sitting at 6,950 feet (2,120 m) of elevation?
Although there are inherent advantages to putting your body through the struggles of lower oxygen levels, there are also inherent struggles that will come with elevation training. Some struggles may include:
Lower Ferritin Levels: Due to higher erythropoietic activity (the body making new red blood cells, as stated before), the body eats into its ferritin stores. Ferritin, or iron, is important in all kinds of ways in the body, so if these stores are not sufficiently maintained, the increased effort could lead to detrimental changes.
Reduced Recovery and Accelerated Fatigue: Increased effort at higher elevations leads to less recovery and therefore more compounded stress on the body. As most people know, recovery is important for the body and is the primary preventative measure against getting injured.
Increased Production of Cortisol: More physical stress on the body can lead to higher production of cortisol, which is the brain’s stress hormone.
How to Properly Train at Altitude
Now that we know the benefits and drawbacks of altitude training, we can come up with a plan for how to apply our new-found knowledge to our training. Now keep in mind that no training plan is perfect for every athlete, so here are a few plans that have generally worked for successful athletes and how their success in training can apply to you.
For starters, make sure that altitude training will actually benefit you. Altitude training is primarily focused on by endurance athletes, such as distance runners, bikers, swimmers, etc., due to the specific benefits that are received from the lower amount of oxygen. It is important to note that short, more intense sports such as football, sprinting, or throwing will receive better results from competing at high altitudes. Thanks to the lower air pressure, training at these heights will not necessarily lead to better results in training.
Altitude training requires a lot of planning and resources to train properly, making dedication and commitment essential to the practice. However, the most important factor of altitude training is obviously, the altitude. As seen in the topographical map of elevations above, most of the places of high elevation are on the West Coast. Unfortunately, athletes in the East Coast must relocate far to properly train at altitude. In fact, all of the best states for altitude training are located in the Western Region, some of which include Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico.
Time is also a big commitment when it comes to properly training at altitude. Research shows that the typical athlete only starts to get the benefits of altitude training once their body fully acclimates to the elevation. This process does not start until two weeks into acclimation, and is only fully acclimated after four weeks. In order to get the full effect of altitude training, the athlete must train at a high place of elevation for around a month.
One of the primary benefits of altitude training comes from the change in cells. However, the benefits only last as long as those cells are alive. The average cell life in an adult is one month, but in a hard-training athlete, cells usually die within three weeks. If an athlete were to train at altitude for one month, they would only receive the cellular benefits for at most another month. This being said, the advantages of training at high elevation are the accumulated muscle build of working with less recovery. While this can lead to injury, it can also lead to quicker muscle growth. Therefore, it is imperative to monitor the body and ensure sufficient recovery.
If you’re still here at this point and you’re still thinking that altitude training might be right for you, you may be wondering exactly what kind of training you should do. Of course, there are always new developments to training methods. Even so, the ideology behind altitude training is to try to keep the same amount of workload while you are still at altitude. This will give you the benefits of living at high elevation while still getting the physical development of training. Struggling during acclimation is inevitable, so make sure to ease into full mileage when first moving to a higher elevation.
An alternate route to taking off mileage is called “Living High and Training Low."but the basic concept is that you spend most of your time at high altitude so your body can produce the cells that it gets from low oxygen levels while still being able to train at full load at a more manageable sea level. This is thought to be the most optimal way of training, but it is also the most difficult due to the fact that you would need to be living at the top of a mountain and have to travel down to a lower elevation for every training session.
Alternative Training Methods
Now, all this information at once can be a little hard to digest, and it may sound like a lot of work to only gain this chemical advantage for as little time as a month. If you think that traveling to high altitude may be out of the cards for you, then you’re in luck, because there have been technological advances to help bring the advantages of training and living at altitude to athletes who actually live at sea level.
The most common method for simulating altitude training is by using altitude masks which limit the amount of air you are allowed to breathe in by using valves. This simulates the lack of oxygen that you would experience at high levels. However, the name is actually misleading. These training masks fail to encourage the body to create those erythropoietin hormones that create red blood cells– the complete opposite of the purpose of altitude training. Although training masks still help the body with respiratory efficiency, the same effect can be simulated by holding your breath while running. This method, funnily enough, is an actual training method of its own– hypoventilation training.
Arguably, the best alternative to altitude training is using a nitrogen tent. Nitrogen tents simulate the lack of oxygen that you would experience at altitudes, through chemical levels that will help release erythropoietin hormones. These tents are hooked up to hypoxicators that can match the symptoms you want to recreate by setting an ‘altitude’. Companies have even started to put these into entire houses, so you could spend your whole day living on the beach in California while your body experiences the elevation of Colorado! Although these tents are costly, they are much cheaper compared to the prices of traveling and living in a different state for a month. Additionally, these tents are portable, and you can use them for a long time, meaning that the benefits of altitude training could be more accessible.
Conclusion
Altitude training allows the athlete a unique advantage by capitalizing on the oxygen deficit of higher elevation and the chemical reactions that come with it. From hot air ballooning to tents that can make you feel like you’re on a mountain, altitude training has evolved all the way to modern athletic training and is still being studied today. Reaching new heights in training isn’t just a metaphor; it’s science. Whether it’s scaling mountains or exploring innovative technologies, altitude training offers a breath-taking path to peak performance.
Works Cited
Baker, A, and W G Hopkins. “Altitude Training for Sea-Level Competition.” Www.sportsci.org, 1998, www.sportsci.org/traintech/altitude/wgh.html#table2. Accessed 29 June 2024.
Mateo, Ashley. “Some Face Masks Claim to Improve Endurance Performance by Restricting How Much Air You Get.” Runner’s World, 29 Jan. 2021, www.runnersworld.com/training/a34984200/running-with-an-elevation-training-mask/.
Rybnikova, Elena A., et al. “Intermittent Hypoxic Training as an Effective Tool for Increasing the Adaptive Potential, Endurance and Working Capacity of the Brain.” Frontiers in Neuroscience, vol. 16, 21 June 2022, https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2022.941740.
“The History of Altitude Training - Intermittent Hypoxic Exposure (IHE).” AltoLab USA LLC, altolab-usa.com/pages/the-history-of-altitude-training-iht.
Valle, Carl. “Is Training at Altitude Worth It for Athletes?” SimpliFaster, 6 Mar. 2018, simplifaster.com/articles/altitude-training/.