Elizabeth Wadsworth 9272

Tunbridge Wells Girls Grammar School

Is altitude training the best way to legally improve sporting performance?

Many athletes are struggling to find different ways of improving their sporting performance, and out-perform their rivals, without the use of illegal substances. Biologists are looking into different ways in which athletes can improve their performance level legally and without the use of drug doping techniques.

The use of banned performance-enhancing drugs in sports is commonly referred to as doping, particularly by the organisations that regulate sporting competitions. The use of drugs to enhance performance is considered unethical by most international sports organisations. The reasons for the ban are mainly the health risks of performance-enhancing drugs and the equality of opportunity for athletes. If found to be using performance enhancing drugs, athletes face potential bans from the sport and therefore risk throwing their careers away.

Due to the above reasons, it is of upmost importance that biologists and athletes alike find suitable methods to enable them to be continually improving their performance without breaking rules set by anti-doping authorities.

Solution: Altitude Training

Altitude training invokes physiological changes. Training at altitude - where the oxygen level is considerably lower - allows athletes to increase their red blood cell count. This enables them to compete more effectively at sea level because more oxygen is delivered to the muscles. (1) As a result of this claim, it has been incorporated in the training regimes of elite athletes in an effort to improve sea level performance. Several training strategies, such as constant altitude exposure, intermittent altitude exposure or live high train low, have been used in an effort to incur an advantage in sea level performance over just sea level training alone. At intermediate altitudes, the air still contains approximately 20.9% oxygen, but the partial pressure of oxygen is reduced. Partial pressure is a way of describing how much of a gas is present at any one time. (2) However, altitude training may not be suitable for some athletes depending on their age, fitness level, health and the energy and technical requirements of their sport.

Figure 1 - Britain's 5,000m runner Mo Farah at altitude

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The physiological adaptation that is mainly responsible for the performance gains achieved from altitude training is a subject of discussion among researchers. Some, including American researchers Ben Levine and Jim Stray-Gunderson, claim it is primarily the increased red blood cell volume that improves performance. (3) Others, including Australian researcher Chris Gore, and New Zealand researcher Will Hopkins, dispute this and instead claim that the gains are primarily a result of other adaptions such as a switch to a more economic mode of oxygen utilization (the proportion of oxygen in the blood which diffuses into tissues as it passes through the capillaries). (4)

Solution 1: Altitude Training

Method

The study led by James Stray-Gunderson, (5) aimed to investigate the effects of the Living high-training low aspect of altitude training and how it improves sea level performance in male and female elite runners. This training idea involves living at higher altitudes in order to experience the physiological adaptations that occur, such as increased erythropoietin (EPO) levels (EPO is a hormone that controls red blood cell production), increased red blood cell levels and higher VO2 max, while maintaining the same exercise intensity during training at sea level. VO2 max is the maximum or optimum rate at which the heart, lungs, and muscles can effectively use oxygen during exercise, used as a way of measuring a person's individual aerobic capacity. (6)

A group of scientists realised that acclimatisation to moderate high altitude accompanied by training at low altitude (living high-training low) has been shown to improve sea level endurance performance in accomplished, but not elite, runners. Elite athletes are athletes amongst the best in their country, competing in international and national competitions, using sport as their profession and earning money from it. Accomplished athletes are ones that still train regularly yet compete in a lower level band of competitions (possibly regional level). Whether elite athletes, who may be closer to the maximal structural and functional adaptive capacity of the respiratory (i.e., oxygen transport from environment to mitochondria) system, may achieve similar performance gains is unclear. Thus, the experiment was carried out in order to answer this question.

Athletes who use Live High and Train Low live and/or sleep at moderate altitude (2000-3000 m) and simultaneously train at low elevation (< 1500 m).

To answer this question, they studied 14 elite men and 8 elite women before and after 27 days of living at 2,500 m while performing high-intensity training at 1,250 m. The experiment took place in Salt Lake City, which is the capital and the most populous city in the US state of Utah (Figure 3). The altitude break began 1 week after the USA Track and Field National Championships, when the athletes were close to their seasons fitness peak. The detailed timetable of the experiment is shown in Figure 2. From this figure you can also learn that the competition took place throughout June and July.

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The athletes used in the study were required to be competitive at a national level in a long-distance running event from the 1,500 m to the marathon. Twenty-four of the 26 athletes were ranked in the US top 50 for their event in 1997. The athletes included two 1996 Olympians, and 50% of the athletes had competed in the 1996 US Olympic Trials. All but four athletes competed in the 1997 NCAA Championships or the 1997 USA Track and Field Championships or both. Exclusion criteria included altitude residence (+1,000m) or recent illness or injuries preventing normal training and racing. All of the subjects involved had given their written consents to partake in the study. The study had gained approval from the Institutional Review Board of the University of Texas South-western Medical Centre.

This study protocol was a modification of one previously developed by the same authors for college runners, not elite performers (7). College runners are ones that represent their college or university at a sport.

1) First of all the athletes were assessed at sea level in the week before 27 days of living at 2,500 m (see Figure 2).

2) The NCAA Championships were held at sea level 3 weeks before the altitude break, and the USA Track and Field Championships had ended 1 week before the altitude break.

3) Individualised training plans were developed specifically for the athlete by his/her coach. These plans were discussed with the investigators and conformed to a training template presented by the investigators.

4) The athletes were required to perform high-intensity and high-velocity training at 1,250 m for 27 days. All other training took place between 1,250 and 3,000 m high with most of the training occurring between 2,000 m and 2,800 m.

5) All athletes received an oral liquid iron supplementation (Feo-Sol, 9mg elemental iron/ml) with dose adjusted on the basis of plasma ferritin concentration.

6) The athletes were then tested once more and results of the study were gained.

This slight modification of the Living high-training low (HiLo) model, the modification termed HiHiLo, (living at moderate altitude, low-intensity base training at moderate altitude, high-intensity interval training at low altitude), has been demonstrated in pilot work to provide identical improvement in VO2 max and 5,000-m time as the original HiLo model (8).

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Figure 2 - Timetable for the experiment. NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association); USATF (USA Track and Field); Hi (high altitude); Lo (low altitude).

Figure 3 Salt Lake City, where the 27 day training camp was run

The Athlete Testing Phase Process

The scientists required a sea-level performance control from each athlete, so that the effects of the altitude training could be compared to an original fitness level.

Racing Performance - They were assessed by a 3,00m time trial race performed on a 400m all-weather track (Indiana University, Bloomington, IN) the day before and again 3 days after the altitude break. The time trials were run in mens and womens heats in the early evening (7pm to 8pm). The athletes were instructed to achieve the best time possible on each time trial, and they ensured that this would occur by making it a competitive environment between the athletes. Experienced pace setters (athletes not otherwise involved in the project) were utilized to set a fast, competitive pace for the first 1,600 m of the 3,000 m race to ensure physiological rather than tactical performance. The pace setter or rabbit ran the same preselected race pace in both the pre-altitude and post-altitude time trials. Temperatures ranged from 25 to 27C, relative humidity ranged between 50 and 75%, and there was no wind. Time was recorded for each subject to the nearest 0.1 s.

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Results

Fourteen men and eight women successfully completed the protocol. Four subjects (three male and one female) suffered injury or illness during the break that prevented normal training or racing and were not included in the analysis. There were no gender differences with respect to the response to the altitude camp; therefore, data for men and women are considered together. The results are reliable because the