Globe Articles on Simulated Altitude Training

I'm not sure what prompted it, but today's Boston Globe has two articles about simulated altitude training. One of the articles describes how traditional team sports -- such as basketball and soccer -- are experimenting with having athletes do some of their conditioning work in hypobaric (low atmospheric pressure) chambers. The other article, by Globe basketball writer Shira Springer, describes her experience with a borrowed hypobaric sleeping chamber.

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High-altitude training has always had fascination for endurance athletes since some of the positive physical adaptations to altitude - an increase in the number of red blood cells and the oxygen-carrying capacity of those cells -- are also beneficial to running, cycling, and other endurance sports. Unfortunately, training at altitude can also compromise the quality of workouts. In attempting to balance the benefits of training at low altitude intensity while getting high-altitude adaptation, exercise physiologists developed the "train low, live high" approach. This calls for doing one's training at near sea level atmospheric pressure, but sleeping at high altitude atmospheric pressure.

One problem with that approach, mentioned very briefly in one of the Globe articles, is that high-altitude sleeping can compromise recovery during the body's time to repair the stresses of training. Essentially, one is training even while sleeping.

So if you want to shave half a minute off your 5K time should you save your money from that summer job to buy a $7000 altitude tent? Well, in a word, no. Improvements in fitness are still a result of training hard. The tent is just another variation of the exercise machine that seems to offer a shortcut to fitness but really is only another way of packaging the hard work required of the athlete. In other words, if it gets you to work harder, it would be worth it. But its the work, not the machine, that produces the improvement.

After several weeks of experimenting with the altitude tent and seeing her fitness improve, Springer writes:

"Does all the credit go to the tent? Probably not. Part of the drop in times and decrease in fatigue was a natural byproduct of training hard. The tent does not do the work for you. Part was because of cooler weather. Part was probably also psychological, considering the more I believed in the positive effects of tent living, the better I ran."