Alex Hutchinson calls out CANOVA over study confirming EPO works on Kenyan runners

Canova is a liar wrote:

Direct link to the abstract of the new article:

https://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/Abstract/publishahead/Effects_of_EPO_on_Blood_Parameters_and_Running.96809.aspx

I will have to go down to the library to read the full article.

Notably look at the conclusion that EPO worked just as well for those living and training at altitude as it did for those living and training at sea level.

I'm sure it is just a coincidence...

The issue at hand is whether it adds anything in terms of performance improvements in world class endurance athletes who have acclimated to high altitude training over a long period of time. His contention is "no". I do not disagree, as there is no data that specifically has looked at this that would convince me otherwise. Absent that, I, as a physiologist, would defer to Mr. Canova. Mostly because he has observed these runners for years, and absent any data to the contrary. It also appears that the study design in question may be lacking. If you get to the library post the entire article, as I'd be interested. I'm too lazy these days to go do it myself.

1) how can he say that? when so MANY WRs have been PED induced? thats just asinine

2) as the EPO study on the effects of mitochondria have shown, hematocrits isnt the issue as you will see in 3

3) the study that i have linked 4 times since i first found in in july...rhEPO SIGNIFICANTLY INCREASES THE SIZE AND NUMBER OF MITOCHONDRIA. how is this hard to understand? yes a larger V02max can slightly increase performance, but its not how much oxygen you can push into your blood stream, no its comes down to mitochondria using that 02 to create ATP for energy, to expel CO2, to convert lactate back into ATP....

read it again

and when your done with that, read about how mitochondria function especially during exercise. and then tell me if you were to all the sudden have MORE and LARGER mitochondria than you NATURALLY should, you dont think that would make you faster?

Canova is a liar wrote:

3hr-marathoner wrote:

My understanding is that Canova's confidence that EPO doesn't work on the highest level athletes who are correctly trained at altitude comes from three points he repeatedly makes:

1) some of the greatest performances have been achieved by clean athletes

Let's just focus on this one. It is indeed part of the basis for Canova's assertion. However it is totally and completely unable to be confirmed. This is not science. And Canova has repeatedly given misleading or inaccurate representations in other areas.

There is no good scientific reason to believe that EPO does not work with the highest level athletes.

OR..............that it does.

m!ndweak wrote:

read it again

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3299978/

and when your done with that, read about how mitochondria function especially during exercise. and then tell me if you were to all the sudden have MORE and LARGER mitochondria than you NATURALLY should, you dont think that would make you faster?

I think you are misunderstanding me m!ndweak wrote:. I make no claim that 1-3 are true, only that even if they are, they still do not prove Canova's claim. Consider me scientifically skeptical on all three points.

OLD SMTC SOB wrote:

Canova is a liar wrote:

Let's just focus on this one. It is indeed part of the basis for Canova's assertion. However it is totally and completely unable to be confirmed. This is not science. And Canova has repeatedly given misleading or inaccurate representations in other areas.

There is no good scientific reason to believe that EPO does not work with the highest level athletes.

OR..............that it does.

All of the evidence shows that EPO works.

If Canova (or you) have evidence that you have injected EPO in world class athletes and it has not lead to improvement in times, then you should present it.

Or you can continue with your Humian scepticism, while the rest of us feed our sheep.

If you are going to dismiss the article without reading it and admit that you are too lazy to actually track down the article and read it, you should really stop posting about the subject at all.

sorry i had you mistaken.

and i am re reading it again and more info on mitochondria....never really payed attention to it all back in the day cause the professors were all about V02 was the KEY too all things....

anyways carry on with your own questions....glad you arnt one of those die hard, bett the potato farm and mock all those who dont agree with renato

The distinction between correlation and causation is particularly hard for a non-scientist to appreciate. Renato, do you have any formal scientific training?

from how i can imagine this is how it works, and why it is not dependent on hematocrit levels.

you take a full deep breath, you inhale so many liters of air, 19% or so of that is 02. you have so many mitochondria in your muscle cells taking in the available O2. lets say you only have enough mitochondria to use 70% of the oxygen you inhaled.

now you take rhEPO, which looks similar to EPO but its not, its been cloned from cells, i think there are two main ways to make synthetic EPO, or rhEPO...anyways this unnatural EPO "significantly" changes the SIZE and NUMBER of mitochondria you have in your muscles.

now lets say you are absorbing 95% of the available oxygen instead of 70%. your hematocrit levels are only slightly higher, but now you are absorbing MORE oxygen into your cells than ever before.

with more mitochondria combining oxygen with glucose, you are now producing WAY more ATP than ever before. more ATP more times the muscle can contract and extend. also mitochondria holds calcium, more and larger mitochondria the more calcium can be stored, which is essential in the kreb cycle, as well as being THE key component in the muscle contraction, calcium ions bind to troponin, thus causing tropomyosin to shift from the face of the actin filament to which myosin heads need to bind to produce contraction.

but no listen to the gurus who think they can blow smoke over and over about how hematocrit levels prove EPO doesnt work.

look at this, i have linked it before but makes much more sense now

https://academic.oup.com/ndt/article/22/10/2749/1832304

this is the part to look at

"Transfected bacteria such as Escherichia coli are useful as hosts for the production of non-glycosylated recombinant proteins"

and then this on tid bit on mitochondria

"Although most of a cell's DNA is contained in the cell nucleus, the mitochondrion has its own independent genome that shows substantial similarity to bacterial genomes.[15]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrion

to me this makes sense, they use bacteria with the EPO gene, then into hamster cells for mass production. i think its the bacteria that gets mixed into this and is the cause for the SIGNIFICANT change in size and number of mitochondria in the cells, since mitochondria genome is substantialy similar to baterial genomes.

training at altitude isnt going to give you a baterial boost of mitochondria....but what do i know, im just reading stuff and asking why and how rhEPO made significant changes in SIZE and NUMBER of mitochondria

No, I don't have any formal scientific training.

Have the researchers and the scientists any formal methodological training ?

There was in the athletics history some scientists or physiologist with formal scientific training able to become a coach of top athletes ?

Readers don't understand that the final goal of a coach is to drive the athletes to their best possible results, not to his higher Hct or Hb.

And, for mindweak, about the effect of EPO on the mitochondria : Do you know that this IS THE SAME EFFECT OF PROPER TRAINING IN ALTITUDE ?

And, answering to some other post : Yes, I don't know if, giving EPO to Sondre (for example) he maybe could run in 2:03'

But why you don't try the opposite approach ?

Which proof can you have that, without taking EPO, some of the athletes POSITIVE could not run faster ?

We have some proof, coming from athletes who BEFORE took EPO and were banned, and AFTER SOME YEAR (and very deep antidoping tests, like happens with ALL the doped athletes when start competing again after finishing the period of disqualification) were able to IMPROVE the result achieved when doped.

The names of these athletes are WILSON ERUPE LOYANAI (positive test in competition on 4.01.2013), PB before being banned 2:05:37 in 2012, PB after the ban 2:05:13 in 2016, and MATHEW KISORIO (positive test in competition during the National Championships of 10000m on 14.06.2012, incidentally his WORST competition of 10000m ever), PB before the ban 2:10:58 in 2011, PB after the ban 2:06:33 in 2015 and 2:06:36 in Paris this year.

I'm not interested to know if EPO works or not with top athletes. I'm interested to say that, IN CLEAN WAY AND WITHOUT TAKING ANY EPO, athletes can be the best in the World, in spite of the widespread opinion that all the best are doped, supposition that creates great mental limits to the evolution of the athletes.

And, looking at ALL the results of athletes that I KNOW are totally clean (not only coached by myself), I don't have any doubt that EPO can't give anything more to the athletes when they have the best training, looking at their event.

Last thing : if the research is not the one of young boys, but is a new research with athletes of medium-high level, why the researchers don't give more precise data :

a) The PB of everybody before the EPO administration

b) Their normal training before the EPO administration

c) The type of training DURING the EPO administration

d) The technical results achieved AFTER the EPO administration (not the fact their Hct became higher, I don't care, the World Championships for the Higher Hct don't exist)

e) The training they continued to do AFTER finishing the EPO administration, and the new results obtained.

If they detail ALL THESE POINTS, and really I can see some improvement NOT CONNECTED with a difference in their training, maybe that I can start to think EPO can give some advantage. Till when we don't know all those data, and the research is something mysterious, we can't have any proof that, with this athletes, EPO works.

and you dont have to believe me, trust jonO and rek for the truth....but the wonderful thing of google....i make my assumptions then search...boom here is a paper on WHY they use E coli bacteria..

"Low cost and simplicity of cultivating bacteria make the E. coli expression system a preferable choice for production of therapeutic proteins both on a lab scale and in industry. In addition straightforward recombinant DNA technology offers engineering tools to produce protein molecules with modified features"

modified features? i wonder if thats what they would consider the bonus mitochondria you get from rhEPO?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3179032/

just when i thought things were simple, i had to dig....E. coli with EPO gene, then placed into a hamster cell, then injected into some "18" yr old east african....WRs aside, the people pushing this sh*t should be in jail for sure....like what the hell, sounds like some strange island of dr moreau sh*t. i mean injecting your lips with stem cells from aborted babies is pretty bad too, but this chimera doping is nuts! i had no idea rhEPO was this messed up.

Maybe not more or bigger, but it looks like there might be an effect on function in humans. (Small sample size I know, but it backs up what is shown in mice pretty consistently).

Renato, I'm a big fan of yours. Your literally the best person on letsrun. I agree with all your philosophies with running. I want us to get to know eachother and be closer. Maybe we can go for coffee somewhere nice in Italy together. Do you have any updates on Bekele's preparation for Amsterdam? It would be nice to meet you and have nice chats about him. Then we can talk for hours and hours about sweet and sour and how your families doing ok.

If rhEPO does not work on them, then that makes them pretty stupid to be taking something that can get them banned and that is not doing them any good.

JonO. wrote:,They are fast because they are super efficient biomechanically. Running is a skill that takes huge amount of training to develop from a baby to an adult.

.

Oh yes, the "running is a skill" myth. Everything is a "skill" then. I.E., you've said nothing.

(and in reality, if you look at any playground across America, you will see kids sprinting across the playground with perfect running form, untaught by coaches or "huge amounts of training" or years of practice. But I guess when they start to get tired due to lack of aerobic/anaeorbic development, they suddenly lose their "skill", and have to stop and take a rest. Hmmm....someone needs to teach them the "skill" of not getting tired.)

Is there something new? Did they change the method? How did they address and correct the basic flaws in the previous study?

casual obsever wrote:

Renato Canova wrote:

5) The research doesn't have, as subjects, any athlete belonging to the category I consider in my statement.

The runners of the research had a test of 3000m before taking EPO. The average for Kenyans was 9'35", for Scottish 11'.

No. You evidently haven't looked into this new work. The authors tested 63' half marathoners and 2:12 marathoners. Ok, most of us here are faster, but still, those weren't beginners.

Interestingly, they improved their 3000 m times by 4.6% after 4 weeks of EPO, although the Hct increase was less than 10%. As we know since Ashenden 2011, that modest increase would not have triggered the ABP alarm, i.e. IAAF would not have considered these dopers as "likely doping".

3) the study that i have linked 4 times since i first found in in july...rhEPO SIGNIFICANTLY INCREASES THE SIZE AND NUMBER OF MITOCHONDRIA. how is this hard to understand? yes a larger V02max can slightly increase performance, but its not how much oxygen you can push into your blood stream, no its comes down to mitochondria using that 02 to create ATP for energy, to expel CO2, to convert lactate back into ATP..

This point said it all, is very important and is the most important condition for improving performance in distance running

from amateur runners to elite runners . Thats what Canova call the Aerobic House. An amateur can have a 5 floor house

an elite runner a 10 floor house. And coach Lydiard discovered many years ago that to build that house you need to run

"slow" and for many miles in the base period of training. Now of course that type of training is change but the concept is still valid. Anyway the results of such phisiological improvment ( more mitochondria and with bigger size) is to produce less lactate

at a given speed and this is what we want (from an amateur to an elite) to improve the performance in distance running.

yeah and if rhEPO gives you an unnatural amount of mitochondria then baaabooom

whats going to be classic is if one day renato finally loses his sh*t and says

"YOU MORON IDIOT, I TELL YOU SO TIME MANY THAT EPO WORK DOESNT! I KNOW BECAUSE I INJECTED BEST ATHLETES WITH IT TO GAIN WR. IT DIDNT WORK! ONLY WORK FOR OFFSEASON TO GAIN 90% TOP AEROBIC MACHINE, MORON I KNOW THIS I DID TRIAL ERROR FOR 18yrs!"

then we can all say, "wow renato was telling the truth, he knows EPO doesnt work cause he tried it for 18yrs, he knows so much about EPO, he is the guru of gurus....too bad it took him so long to come clean about how he knows about EPO"

Mindweak, all your studies about CLINIC situations have the only effect to produce headache for everybody tries to read without understanding what you write. A lot of formula that everybody can find in internet, that don't have any connection with the training methodology.

We are not speaking about sick people, but about ATHLETES whose goal is to achieve their best RUNNING (and not doing some other sport).

The day that people here start to speak about training, we can have a normal discussion. But, till when you attack with idiotic and not fair allegation, without accepting the results of the coaching of many top athletes (and not only MY coaching), we never can have any point of contact.

Simply, you don't know anything about training, while I speak about training.

And the athletes run fast because of their training, not because EPO. We have fast athletes with clean training, and slow athletes taking EPO. We also have fast athletes taking EPO, and slow athletes with clean training. This is the reality of athletics : everybody looks for the best way for running fast, but often HIS best way is not really the best way.

The fact that some top athletes take EPO is not a proof that EPO works, but is a proof that, in their mind, EPO can give some advantage, and for that reason they take.

There are researches that the smoke of cigarettes can increase the risk of cancer ; however, there are a lot of people who smoke 60 cigarettes every day, because for them this risk doesn't exist.

What we think is not always the truth, and we create OUR truth in our mind.

The REAL facts are that is possible to have WR with clean training. This doesn't exclude the possibility that somebody can run fast using EPO, but doesn't prove that EPO can give him some advantage, if we don't know the following facts :

1) His training BEFORE taking EPO

2) When he started to take EPO

3) His training DURING taking EPO

All the other suppositions are not facts, but simple speculations.