how much does epo help

There is an upper limit to how high your hematocrit can go (and still allow your heart to safely pump blood). Your 2:05 guy who is working with a natural level of 45 would have "more room to improve" over guy who was a natural 50.

This is why people have different levels of improvement when they go to altitude or dope.

I own a sports trading card (think of a "baseball card" for track) for each famous runner in the 1970s but also for each aspect of our sport.

Check this one out:

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Came to think of this now 11 year old article from norwegian VG.no. Ex pro road cyclist Mads Kaggestad shares his insights after being a WADA guinea pig, and even though theres not any concrete numbers besides a VO2 max, its an interesting read.

"After the flurry of doping revelations, you may have wondered what blood doping does to the body. Here, Mads Kaggestad (35) tells exactly how it feels.

In 1997, TV2's cycling expert was injected with EPO to help in anti-doping work.

The then 21-year-old Kaggestad received EPO under the auspices of the international anti-doping agency WADA. The aim was to find tests that could reveal cyclists who had used the substance, which stimulates the production of red blood cells and thus improves endurance.

- They were very excited about my results. I didn't get to know exactly how well I did, other than that I performed extreamly well, says Kaggestad.

- Could compete without being caught

After the project, he learned that he had had 90 in O2 recordings - off-season. It is a very high record, but Kaggestad also achieved it naturally later on.

- What was interesting was that everyone in the field knew about EPO and that there was no test for it at the time. The cycling association introduced a blood value limit, but even though I received EPO I was never close to it. I could compete with the substance in me without problems, says Kaggestad.

Biked from the teammate

He was one of two cyclists who took part in WADA's project. The other was Gabriel Rasch. For one month, three times a week, the two had injections. But while Kaggestad received EPO, Rasch only received saline.

- Gabriel also felt that things were getting better, but gradually my heart rate started to be lower than his. He also started complaining about my speed in training and said I needed to take it more easy. My workload was lower and I recovered faster. I generally had a lot of energy in my everyday life, I didn't get tired during the training and I felt light. It was as if I got into natural peak shape. When I drove hard, no one followed. There could have been many reasons for that, but it went quickly for me, Kaggestad explains

Kaggestad has previously told VG Nett that some suspected that he was involved in the EPO project to learn, but he believes that only positive things came out of the collaboration with WADA.

- I have never regretted that I was part of it. When you are asked by the highest anti-doping authority if you want to contribute to making a test against EPO, I think it is perfectly fine to ask. I was in the target group and wanted to help, says the 35-year-old.

- On the contrary, it has been very interesting, especially in my job as a cycling commentator, to have tried the substance. I know what it does to the body and can speak with certainty about it, he adds."

Edit: translation mistake

Apparently it gives users a 6% improvement. EPO mixed with steroids together might give you an even bigger improvement,but steroids without EPO, not so much. Fancy magic shoes might give you a 1.5% improvement on their own.

rekrunner: (tried quote posting to respond, but last two times i hit reply the response never made it to the thread here smh)

my moniker/screen-name is the short answer how i came about the model. i don't have the time or rather the organizational skills to write out the long form response in a way i would be content with. it's the type of answer that is best suited for a podcast. not trying to cop out on your question, it's just i'd rather go to the beach to feed the chickens and do my exercises than sit here trying to get the voices in my head all in harmony
one of the things i found during the phase when i was addicted to reading studies was that an incredible amount of said-studies were absolute garbage from the outset, as if those conducting it had no intuition for what they were looking into, were very biased, didn't properly look into the research already done, and/or were possibly just trying to get their name published
are there any specific studies you can link here you want me to give my thoughts on?
i think 3-5% is generally pretty reasonable as an upper bound for international-class athletes. meaning, going from 2:30 to 2:17 (8-9%ish) is more likely for the D2 400/800 guy that was running 48.xx/1:50 then decided to run a marathon after putting on some weight after college and knocked out a 2:30 after running 50-60mpw for a year or two

So cute, another predictable, childish insult. How insecure are you?

a 2:05 guy at 50% turning into a 2:00 guy at 60% seems much less likely than a 2:05 guy at 42% turning in a 2:00 guy at 50%

either way, your example is 10 sec/mile faster so i'd only give the drop down to 2:00ish an outside chance if they've shown ~3:50 or faster mile potential. a 4:00 miler with 24-flat 200 speed going 2:05 can't be pumped with enough gas to run 2:00 in my opinion.

i hate the mechanics of this forum so much. first it took 3 tries to even get my reply to post, then it changes where i wrote 48.xx / 1:50 (without spaces in between) after "D2 400/800 guy that was running..." into a link and deletes it from my response

rojo ffs it's 2024 why are you subjecting us to this slop

Where do you buy real EPO?

TJ Dillashaw got popped for taking an anemia medication called procreate.

its the type of thing once you do enough research on the topic you can generally find someone sourcing it from china and reshipping from US/Europe to the customer. or if you're well connected enough like a TJ Dillashaw you can probably get something like procrit from someone you know in person.

If it is any consolation, I had a lot of trouble replying to your post, getting just a spinning cursor, and had to try multiple times, and finally replied to myself, manually putting in your quote. There must be some special characters or something which is breaking the scripts.

You did say to "feel free to ama". I wonder why make the offer if you don't have the time or the mental organization to answer something worthy of your experience? I was hoping for something more substantive than "trust me bro".

Can you point to some of the distance running performance blood doping studies you found to be the most reliable? Like you, I found a lot I consider "absolute garbage from the outset", for basic reasons like lack of controls and lack of double-blinding and small sample sizes.

You said (paraphrased) you believed Renato to some extent that the best East Africans do not benefit as much as those with sea-level ancestors -- something I also believe. Have you seen that reflected anywhere in the resulting elite performances? I looked, and found little improvement in sea-level athletes during the EPO-era. What I found after reviewing all-time performances, is that, pre-EPO, the best distance athletes (men) were fairly equal across the board in the 1980s, across all distance events ranging from 1500m to the marathon, but then between 1990-2018, the best non-Africans (average top-5 athletes) were only some 0.3%-0.7% faster than pre-EPO era times, while the best East African improvements were significantly faster, improving by 1.1%-3.2%. (This would be the net progression from all sources, both doping and non-doping, rather than individual athlete improvement.) The East African quantity of "faster than 1990" runners was also higher, by a factor of 11x, than all non-Africans worldwide combined, despite the significantly smaller (15-30x) population.

What do you make of the quality of performance results in the Pitsiladis study (see page 2, post #26), and its applicability to national class or elite runners? How would you compare the quality of the Pitsilidas study to altitude studies by Stray-Gundersen: ""Living high-training low (1997)": effect of moderate-altitude acclimatization with low-altitude training on performance", and ""Living high-training low" altitude training improves sea level performance in male and female elite runners (2001)" -- this one finding 1.1% improvement from altitude in national class runners.

The ignorance is yours. EPO has been shown to be more potent than altitude-training and even blood doping. That is why it is used by athletes.

It isn't new discussion. You say exactly what you have always said when the subject has been raised.

I don't see how responding to your feeble posts is a demonstration of insecurity. Your inadequacy makes me almost feel like a bully, it is so unfair picking on you. But then I remind myself you deserve everything that comes at you.

Did someone get off with this defence?

i guess i'm going with the "trust me bro" answer in terms of how i've come up with my own model because over the years i've read everything i can get my hands on, tried most everything i can get my hands on, talked extensively with others who have done so as well and now here i am.

i never took the time to chronicle all the different studies, i just read A LOT, and had no intention of ever conducting or publishing my own studies so didn't really see a need for it, though i do regret that especially when it comes to studies in regards to iron/ferritin since that's a lot less taboo to speak on publically v. the use of hormones/peds

when it comes to studies/books like Stray-Gundersen's (a solid read for sure) one of the things that would always jump out at me, and my personal experience showed, was that a result like 1.1% was a bit deceptive because you'd get people improving by substantially more than that (commonly called "altitude responders") and then those who cracked at altitude

in my own experience, a 400/800 type, when moving to moderate elevation of ~6500 for roughly 7 years, my aerobic power at threshold increased by almost 10%, and while some of that could be accounted for due to a sort of self-reinforcing that i had the potential to keep getting better and was actually quite talented, certainly some of that 10% was just due to the fact i had moved to altitude and very likely got some hematocrit increase but even more substantially a blood volume increase.

using epo (50iu/kg every other day first 2 weeks then every 4th day for 4 weeks) during the off-season increased that power output by over another 10% within six weeks though, which was eye-opening to say the least and ultimately is why i chose not to race anymore; it was clear guys were using and getting away with it, but i didn't want to get in a situation where i was dependent on it to fulfill contractual obligations to a sponsor and constantly worry about getting caught and then publicly humiliated while making the same money i could at virtually any decent job in the US. i can certainly sympathize with those from east africa (or other placed where GDP/capita is super low) where the risk of getting caught is worth it if they can lock in enough money from a few big wins to support their family (extended family too) the rest of their lives before finally being caught and forced to retire but able to keep their winnings.

as to your point about Europeans improving less than Africans since EPO came on the scene, if that is in fact true it wouldn't be terribly surprising at first glance considering EPO does essentially the same thing as blood doping (getting blood transfusions), albeit slightly slower (like 4-6 weeks to build it up instead of 4-6 hours), but a simple injection is much easier and less likely to have serious complications which i would assume are major factors in east africa considering they do not have the same sort of medical facilities available en masse that europe or the US has.

essentially, blood doping has a lot of barriers to entry that your typical kenyan, ethiopian, ugandan etc will certainly not be able to clear without a serious team behind them (granted, it's not easy to do that in the US/EUR alone either), whereas epo opened the floodgates because it's simple, discreet and as long as your ferritin is high enough (bekele is on record stating he kept his around 300) before starting it's going to work.

This article someone posted earlier is crazy, it is a MUST read, don't skip it.

But if even just HGH works that well, forget athletics, why aren't they using it to keep people out of "assisted living" (retirement homes) as long as possible which is basically a death sentence

outsideonline.com

Drug Test

sperkins-pom

Everybody knows that many athletes cheat by using performance-enhancing drugs like steroids, testosterone, and EPO. But what is it like to take these banned substances? Do they really help you win? To find out, we sent an ama...

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Confirmed. Those cheating "sea level Europeans" who used EPO in 1990 that rekrunner mentioned may be exactly the ones who used blood transfusions in 1989. It does not surprise me that they didn't improve much.

On the contrary, they had to learn the EPO dosages and timings first whilst the transfusions had been optimized for a couple of decades.

The US medical system is designed to drain the bank account of people, not make them better. Ask a doctor what they would do for a pro athlete with the same problem as you. It won't be what they can do for you. Insurance will block it and it will be too expensive. What they do for you will be a temporary or partial fix at best.

That said, prescribing HGH to seniors has it's dangers.

Interesting EPO discussion.