Study: Repeated breath holding increases EPO by 24%

To do that you just flex a muscle and hold it flexed for 2 minutes.

Do bodybuilder poses all day and soon you will be one.

The weird trick your friendly neighborhood pharmacist doesn’t want you to know!

You don't need to apologise I don't want to become the weirdo that's holding their breath for supposed athletic gains if it doesn't do anything :/

However this is very different to the study above. In your study the people are jogging whilst holding their breath for 20-35 seconds which primarily would create a high CO2 level in the blood. What others have tested is if you get oxygen saturation below 91% it stimulates the kidneys to produce epo, you get this from long, static breath holds. This obviously not been related to running or aerobic performance.

Did it improve your running at all? As I thought Wim Hof was just for vitality and mental health and stuff, but I haven't really looked into him.

Here's another interesting study. They compared dynamic (holding breath while swimming) and static (just holding breath underwater) in experienced divers versus non-divers. The main findings were that dynamic was much better than static (lower oxygen saturation and thus a bigger boost to EPO production). The experienced divers had a 60% increase in serum EPO which seems large enough to merit consideration but the non-divers had a much smaller response because they couldn't acheive nearly as low oxygen saturations with the shorter breath-holds. The nondivers could only make it ~22 meters per hold while the experienced divers could get ~66 meters and a few over 100 meters.

The study suggests a longitudinal follow-up in experienced divers should be the next step. A 60% increase in EPO seems like it might be worth if elite athletes can get the same results but the boost only lasts a few hours and I imagine spending an hour (2 sets of 5 breathholds w/ 2 min rests and a 10 minute et-break) day doing underwater swimming might compromise your running training (what are lactates like after doing a set of these swims?)

The study also showed a direct correlation between blood oxygen saturation and the EPO response. If you're interested in trying it you could probably do the breath-holds running but you'd want to use a fingertip oximeter to ensure you are getting SpO2's down below 90% and 75% or lower is probably ideal. I'd be curious to see how it worked on elite runners or especially someone living altitude already.

Here's the study:

link.springer.com

Erythropoietic responses to a series of repeated maximal dynamic and static apnoeas in elite and non-breath-hold divers - European Journal of Applied Physiology

Purpose Serum erythropoietin (EPO) concentration is increased following static apnoea-induced hypoxia. However, the acute erythropoietic responses to a series of dynamic apnoeas in non-divers (ND) or elite breath-hold divers...

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A friend of mine is a Doc. He said anytime he sees an older sedentary person have higher than normal hematocrit, it’s always been associated with sleep apnea….basically breath holding.

Old news. Big reason free divers can go so deep

That's right. OSAS is a frequent cause of high hemotacrit (as is smoking BTW).

To give you some idea, people with sleep apnea can have like 50 episodes of desaturation per hour during their sleep !

Not easy to replicate that while awake.

If you want to do it, I think you have to embrace it as part of a larger, ongoing program to maintain wellness through periods of time, rather than as a sort of one off: if you do the exercises tomorrow morning, you will have a better workout tomorrow afternoon, etc. I was more interested in it as an aid to naturally reducing inflammation and possibly improving lactate clearance. I am not sure that it helped very much, but it does have some effect.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Involvement of Lactate and Pyruvate in the Anti-Inflammatory Effects Exerted by Voluntary Activation of the Sympathetic Nervous System

We recently demonstrated that the sympathetic nervous system can be voluntarily activated following a training program consisting of cold exposure, breathing exercises, and meditation. This resulted in profound attenuation of...

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It's genius!

Perhaps singing while running could make a difference 🤔

The issue I see is it appears, although it is not entirely clear, that the blood measurements were made under resting conditions. It seems like the number of interest would be when the spleen has released its blood cells. Is the spleen larger because it is storing more blood cells?

In horses, apparently like 30% of their red blood cells are typically stored in the spleen and are released during strenuous exercise. This adaptation seems to be to allow the heart to work less hard at rest (blood is thinner) but then boost the hemacrit for performance when needed.

Obviously this is not as optimized in humans, but there could could be something similar at work.

And exactly what kind of reaction would do you expect from a half assed statement like this? Fred and I wrote and talked on the phone many times before we actually met in the 80's. He had written about hypoxic training in track technique in the mid 70's. Look it up.

I don't know anything about the science and I'm not going to read the studies, but here in Switzerland, I've heard of people trying to just breathe through the nose for easy runs or even when moving up in pace for shorter periods. For easy treadmill runs, I'll try it out sometimes (provided I don't have a runny nose; that could get me kicked out). I also know a guy who claims to only have breathed through his nose for the first (flat) half of the Jungfrau Marathon in order to not go out too fast. In the end, it'd be interesting to know what the 'records' are for different distances run while holding your breath. It sounds like a Nick Symmonds-type thing. Mr. Symmonds, if you're reading this, how about it?

I have no idea if it works but here’s my story.

I was a good cyclist back in the day. Ended up getting a ride from one race to another in another team van.

It was a long drive. Maybe 8 or 9 hours.

One of the guys in the van was a real deal top level racer. Had won world cups in his cycling discipline.

Huge anti doping guy.

so throughout the day his watch would beep and then he’d hold his breathe until it seemed like he was going to pass out. Like, dude was committed and went DEEP!

I want to say it was about every 30min but this was a long time ago and it could’ve been anywhere between 15min and a hour.

I talked to him about it and he swore by it. He wasn’t just like “I do it just in case it works”…..he was like this works and it’s my jam.

Dude got 4th in the World Cup mountain bike race that next weekend.

Did it help? No clue.

It was wild to see and if nothing else it made me respect the hell out of his commitment to riding a bike fast. Dude also weighed all his food and through trial and error over years figured out his absolute lowest body weight where he’d maintain most power.

oh, and talent. He had poop tons of it.

Was he a quack too?

Damn that's interesting. I used to train by holding my breath when I was a runner! And also used a powerbreathe.

I think the reason it hasn't is that it is dangerous, quite frankly. You'd have people holding their breath to the point of passing out, using their own judgement. No one would want to be responsible for publicising a training method like that.

A world champion boxer Ken Buchanan did underwater swimming full length of an Olympic sized pool.

I was rubbish at swimming but could do a length (don't think full size) underwater and we used to have breath holding competitions after gym training. I was better at that than running!. The key is relaxation. Especially on swimming you have to really do slow. The hardest was 3 widths as the turns really used energy.

Don't know about EPO but when your in the anaerobic zone it def helps. Zatopek did breath holding as well

The boxer took that title in some hot country. He was Scottish and said when it got tough that underwater swimming rally helped him. He also said how you would think you wer fit running on the flat but the real test was training on hilly courses. He did reps as well doing the lamp posts.