Study: Repeated breath holding increases EPO by 24%

After some 'internet research' I'll throw out my hypothesis.

I think it 'breath holding training' on average probably has a very small positive effect on running, but it will vary a lot from person to person.

Reasoning is this sort of training definitely causes enhancement of the diving response. Part of the bodies route to this enhancement seems to be the production of epo. Another part seems to be growing the spleen.

I think these are related. If the spleen gets bigger you need to have more red blood cells to fill it. A common problem of those with an enlarged spleen (from infection or whatever) is anemia--it is sucking up too many blood cells. My guess would be if the spleen doesn't get stimulated to grow your body might create extra blood cells from the epo but later will just dial it back down to whatever your 'set point' is to keep your blood from getting too thick.

In diving, the extra blood cells stored in the spleen are released into the bloodstream as a source of oxygen--many aquatic mammals have extra large spleens to take advantage of this. Some endurance running mammals also have extra large spleens and they will release red blood cells from the spleen into the bloodstream to help running performance.

So guess is if you have the right genetics, this training will get your body to store and release when racing more red blood cells from the spleen than it would without the training.

Even the largest human spleens aren't that big and the growth response probably varies a lot, but I think there are some for which it could make a noticeable running difference.

In high school we would try running 200m holding our breath. I don't think I ever actually accomplished this. You have to go slow enough that you aren't really raising your heart rate much, but not too slow to where it takes too long.

People trying to be the best will do everything they can to be the best. Especially things with a asymmetric cost/benefit (breath holding, recovery rolling, supplements, etc.) I;m guessing this guy also trained 30hrs/wk and was properly disciplined both in and out of training sessions (like weighing his food).

I think the farthest i got was 160m but I ran 100m in 14 once holding breath

If there is an idea for a stupid contest, you can be pretty sure that high schoolers somewhere have done it. Its what you get with a fully developed sense of creativity and minimally developed common sense.

Maybe this is why the crazy times started after the Covid lockdowns - runners being forced to run wearing face masks for a time, increased their EPO levels?

I’ve been around countless world tour guys and you’re overall right. Although, there are guys that eat far from ideally or leave little odds and ins on the table that could potentially help.

this guy was right up with the absolutely strictest about discipline type stuff. No stone unturned.

to your point though nobody on that level skips a workout and isn’t on a world class training program. Plus really sweet genetics.

There are people out there trying to profit from these kind of findings. The body fitness hack types that claim that nasal breathing can change your entire life and so cold plunges and have the time to also do sauna and red light therapy. Sat through one of these types presenting at a NSCA conference. Made the same claims as this study. Good grief.

While training for the Canadian Olympic team (I'm 79 now and was naive about what doping was all about a long time ago), I heard the Russians used two unorthodox training techniques that made their program very successful. First, hold your breath as long as you could and measure the distance and gradually improve that to the point you could do 200 meters without cheating. I got to 180m at most. An athlete I was coaching got to the 200m without practicing much and immediately collapsed. That was the end of that experiment.

I did continue to use part B of that experiment and it damn near killed me. Go out on a fartlek run on a sidewalk that went a couple of miles before you had to encounter traffic. Ran along the North Sask. River and hence no traffic entering from the right. The pace would be called Tempo Run. Run from 1 lamp pole, breathing as one wished, then hold your breath till the next lamp pole, then breathe as you wish and repeat for as many lamp poles. Easy as heck for the first 10 poles or so then got exponentially harder. Eventually, I hated whoever thought up that workout.

I don't know if any of you ever did any Snells (Peter Snell:one of his key workouts), but it is a mind buster. Put up a hurdle on track where you start from, then race as fast as you can to another hurdle you had set up 50m away. As soon as you got there, you slowed down, turned around and jogged to that hurdle and race back to the first hurdle you had set up and repeat. If you got to 10 of those it was almost superhuman. I think Peter said the most he could do was 18 or something like that. The point was that not-dedicated runners would always cheat. i.e. not go all out! I did that once with the Canadian Champion in the 400m who was faster than I. After he got to 6, he started to cheat. Since he was faster than I was, he should have been far ahead of me before #6, but he wasn't he was right along side of me.

A coaching tip, "Occasionally ask one of your athletes to make up a workout and have the team try it. It will give you a good idea where that athlete is coming from.

So if your untrained hct is 52, then training to hold your breath would increase it to 64. What a load of BS. Next

"The Oxygen Advantage" book by Patrick Mckeown is a great resource to learn proper breathing for life and performance. The book addresses EPO increase by way of stimulating an altitude benefits and more.

I was going to chime in with the same- I know a number of high profile coaches (across multiple sports) that have been using methods inspired by The Oxygen Advantage for a number of years.

This is pretty normal in swimming.

Because turning/raising the head to breath slightly slows the swimmer in freestyle or butterfly, swimmers limit the frequency of their breathing during a race.

It's very common for swimmers to do sets of multiple 25-meter intervals with no breath (repeat 25s taking perhaps 12-16 seconds, depending on the swimmer).

When I was a teenager we would often do a short but painful set within a workout: 16x25 no breath, going every 60 seconds. (So you get 45 seconds rest if you do a lap in 15 seconds.) This would cut down through the season to going on the 50 or the 40. The set starts easy enough, but quickly gets VERY hard (lactic nightmare).

Try it on the track sometime, running 100s no-breath and walking the bends!

Nice!

Were you in Saskatoon?

With respect, this is fairly silly.

Almost no runners were doing significant amounts of running with masks on.

yeah a guy on my hs team who graduated last year ran a 1:54 off of no training for a year. he would hold his breath every night before he went to bed. he found out he had an extra bone in his foot and had to get it removed so that's why he had no training for that

This was Edmonton. But I did workouts when in town in Saskatoon along the river and I was in town for a meet. John and Diane Konihowski are my good friends though they live in Calgary now. Do you know them? Good people. I take it you are from Saskatoon.

So you're saying that to increase VO2Max you should decrease VO2Min that sport?