Discussing the effects of proper training : why athletes are able to improve ?

Davey Gravy wrote:

Not sure the purpose of your post; I said that it wasn't likely to be the problem

The point is that there is NO "limiting factor" which prevents additional RBCs from delivering additional oxygen where it is needed (and there is no evidence for a limiting factor for oxygen utilization by muscles with those additional RBCs). That's why EPO works, why blood doping works, etc.

What is the mechanism that corresponds to the "workers" that unload the Oxygen?

How does this happen?

What does a competitor in an event well below maximal O2 consumption levels need with high VO2? If marathon is middle distance, how far is long distance?

"In fact, the O2 transport capacity was found to correlate directly with aerobic performance as can be seen from an increase in performance after infusion of red blood cells (Berglund and Hemmingson, 1987) and by the strong correlation between total Hb and maximal O2 uptake (VO2,max) in athletes (for review see Sawka et al., 2000; Schmidt and Prommer, 2010). Calbet et al found that acute manipulations of the O2 carrying capacity also vary performance (Calbet et al., 2006). Thus, it is a clear advantage for aerobic athletic performance to have a high O2 transport capacity."

You are, deliberately or not, confusing people by focusing on one detail or another, as if neglecting the rest of the big picture meant it wasn't there. Increasing the number of erythrocytes can't, by itself, get more oxygen to working muscle - but it can help if you add other necessary steps like building the right kind of muscle, increasing blood volume, and good breathing patterns.

As long as that extra oxygen being transported has somewhere to go, it will likely make a difference. Muscles with the right combination of aerobic and anaerobic metabolism - anaerobic to get the oxygen to unload more readily, and aerobic to use the oxygen and conversely to help stabilize the low pH created by the anaerobic. This coincides with middle distance, where high "VO2" is most relevant. As with cycling and skiing where attacks alternate with periods of rest.

Imagine a fleet of oil tankers loading up in Saudi Arabia, and going to sell the oil in either the United States or Liberia. The United States has the infrastructure to quickly unload and consume all the oil, Liberia does not. Likewise the highly-trained, elite athlete - particularly the one who uses anabolic enhancers to build extra muscle - is better prepared to take advantage of higher oxygen transport than the novice or modestly trained athlete.

Incidentally I wonder what your athletes think about you going around publicizing their medical data. Did they sign a contract allowing you to do that, or are they merely ignorant of their privacy rights? Who is their doctor?

But all else being equal, why wouldn't it be?

I know. VO2 Max is for a different discussion. If a given athlete's VO2 Max rises, he or she has probably become fitter, but inter-athlete variability, as opposed to intra-athlete variability, in this parameter tells us virtually nothing.

That's not really "the final question" as I see it. True, you could have a hematocrit of 65 and assuming your heart could somehow still pump your yogurt-like blood through your circulatory tree, oxygen delivery to your muscles would not limit your performance in the long distances -- mechanical factors or substrate utilization in mitochondria presumably would. But excluding these supranormal human hematocrit values and looking only at the physiological range these values, improving O2-carrying capacity while holding everything else the same would invariably create a stronger, more capable specimen in overwhelmingly aerobic disciplines, would it not?

What is this data? What you say seems to fly in the face of everything I have read about exercise physiology.

From what recall, ventilation is not a limiting factor in running. We breathe as hard as we need to, air flows into our lungs, and the O2 in that air very rapidly diffuses across the alveolar membrane and is picked up by RBCs while CO2 is unloaded from RBCs and diffuses in the opposite direction. RBCs become as saturated as can be with the available O2. Extracting more O2 from the air somehow -- and I assume that you mean that this extraction process must occur at the level of RBCs -- can only be achieved by adding more RBCs, or in the short term by introducing "artiificial air" with extremely high oxygen content (about the ~21% seen in the wild, as it were). So again, we are back to square one.

Yes, I know. This is very basic. My argument is that unless you have some kind of demonstrable pulmonary problem, or a marble stuck in one of your bronchi, you are going to have, in your lungs, all of the O2 you are ever going to get simply by breathing hard like any hard-working distance runner.

Are you talking about training being able to create more O2 binding sites on RBCs or something? Because arterial O2 saturation has never been shown to increase even in highly trained subjects.

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KMB wrote:

Renato Canova wrote:

with EPO we have the increase of ability to transport Oxygen, and there is no real demonstration that this characteristic is ALWAYS connected with the increase in performance.

But all else being equal, why wouldn't it be?

Amen. You're highlighting what is pretty much par for the course Re: Renato's silliness/trolling. Joan Benoit had a VO2 Max of 78. Frank Shorter had a VO2 Max of 71. Shorter ran nearly 11 minutes faster in the marathon. THEREFORE, (choose your Renato lie) 1) VO2 Max is completely unimportant, OR 2) One can lower VO2 Max by @10% AND run almost 11 minutes faster in the marathon!!

lol lol lol lol wrote:

Amen. You're highlighting what is pretty much par for the course Re: Renato's silliness/trolling. Joan Benoit had a VO2 Max of 78. Frank Shorter had a VO2 Max of 71. Shorter ran nearly 11 minutes faster in the marathon. THEREFORE, (choose your Renato lie) 1) VO2 Max is completely unimportant, OR 2) One can lower VO2 Max by @10% AND run almost 11 minutes faster in the marathon!!

Perhaps I am imagining things, but a number of times in this thread, Renato seems to have answered questions by asking questions of his own and then becoming a tad churlish when people don't respond to those questions, or become dismissive. Also, he tends to hop around a bit, sequentially offering different reasons that clean runners can attain extremely fast performances: more guts, or "io," as he puts it; improved ability to extract oxygen from the air; living at high altitude and training optimally there, whatever that means; others. Since, as Renato himself admits, none of these things can even be quantified using any methods I can conceive up, they basically lie in the realm of metaphysics and that seems, well, quirky at best given that Renato is ostensibly a scientist through and through.

Bad Wigins, thank you for the link which I didn't know, where there are many interesting infos.

One of these regards the hypothetical advantages of training in altitude, not connected with blood variations :

"This review also explores evidence of factors other than accelerated erythropoiesis that can contribute to improved athletic performance at sea level after living and/or training in natural or artificial hypoxia. We describe a range of studies that have demonstrated performance improvements after various forms of altitude exposures despite no increase in red cell mass. In addition, the multifactor cascade of responses induced by hypoxia includes angiogenesis, glucose transport, glycolysis, and pH regulation, each of which may partially explain improved endurance performance independent of a larger number of red blood cells. Specific beneficial nonhematological factors include improved muscle efficiency probably at a mitochondrial level, greater muscle buffering, and the ability to tolerate lactic acid production. Future research should examine both hematological and nonhematological mechanisms of adaptation to hypoxia that might enhance the performance of elite athletes at sea level".

It seems that this research can support my idea that there are other factors but the hematological variations that can influence athletics performances of high levels, and there are not yet proper researches in that direction.

This, also, is confirmed by the data I have : the number of RBC is not ALWAYS a factor of improvement in the performances, as demonstrated by the two examples of Chinese athletes, dramatically improving in Asian Games in spite of the LOWEST blood values they had during the last two months of training.

All the other thing, of course coming from researches regarding "average people", are correct, but can't explain the reality.

Incidentally, I don't have any contract with any individual athlete, but I speak with them continuously, and nobody is afraid to show their blood values, since they don't have anything to hide, or anything to show.

I have a question wrote:

My question is: are the top athletes on the verge of dying from having too many red blood cells? Otherwise, couldn't they stand to make gains from higher hematocrit levels?

What Alberto means is that the worlds best athletes have a Hct that is very close to the LEGAL LIMIT. In other words, they would not benefit from doping while staying within these limits (and therefore not testing positive.

Of course they would benefit from a Hct of 55. Like Bjarne Riis had in the mid 1990s. Or many Kenyan distance runners back then, when there was no testing yet.

Renato,

In all of your years of looking at blood values, did you ever notice a correlation between testosterone and talent? Have athletes such as Shaheen and Kemboi extra high testosterone or is there something else to explain their talent?

I don't know about Ezekiel Kemboi. But, about Shaheen and his elder Brother Christopher Kosgei (who was my first kenyan winning a gold medal in WCh), when their shape improved (without too many tests : I consider a better shape when they were able running faster than before...), their testosterone was higher. I can't say the difference was too big, but in any case was significative.

In my opinion, one of the basic differences among the physiological changes due to training only, and the changes due to EPO assumption, is the different deformability of the cells. More the cells are deformable, less viscosity we have, and this is a product of training, not possible with the assumption of some external aid.

With training we can increase the work of stress hormones, which can stimulate the release of reticulocytes.

"Stress hormones such as catecholamines and cortisol stimulate the release of reticulocytes from the bone marrow and possibly also enhance erythropoiesis (Dar et al., 2011; Hu and Lin, 2012). Erythropoiesis is also stimulated by growth hormone and insulin-like growth factors (Kurtz et al., 1988; Christ et al., 1997) which also increase during exercise (Hakkinen and Pakarinen, 1995; Schwarz et al., 1996).

Sulfur wrote:

What about drugs aiding with recovery? Sure everyone can improve their recovery with the use of PED and in that way train:

- Harder and improve more

- Stay more healthy and recover faster from injury

- Be in shape more often

This is total nonsense.

lol lol lol lol wrote:

If you take someone with a hematocrit of 45 with a 99% saturation level and you boost his hematocrit to 55 (same blood volume), you will still get a saturation level of 99%.

The issue is oxygen exchange at the cellular level, not in the blood.

Simply changing one parameter, without looking at the entire balance of the body, is typical of the medical shell game and typically results in performance decrease.

I have to think that Prefontaine believed he could compete with and even beat althletes like Lasse Viren even though most people now believe Viren was doped to the gills.

This supports your theory that when runners are fit, they tend to believe records are not out of reach even for those who are clean.

What I meant to say is that I think everyone needs to have drugs and therefore everyone who wins a race is on drugs, in fact I take them myself because I want to be the best in the world. Even though I suck at everything.

J.R. wrote:

Sulfur wrote:

What about drugs aiding with recovery? Sure everyone can improve their recovery with the use of PED and in that way train:

- Harder and improve more

- Stay more healthy and recover faster from injury

- Be in shape more often

This is total nonsense.

Only to you.

Dear Renato,

Thank you for once again posting here.

You ask the question why does proper training cause athletes to improve. Maybe you are trying to think of new ways to train that can cause athletes to break WR without doping.

I would like to turn this question around and ask you: is training HEALTHY or UNHEALTHY?

I think that if you were to take a poll on Letsrun, letting each person define "healthy" and "unhealthy" for himself or herself, you would get the answer that in the beginning training is healthy, but that if you want to perform your best, you have to do training that is unhealthy for a little while.

For example Lydiard spoke of prolonging base phase as long as possible, then have training for competition phase last a determined time, and not longer. Apparently base phase training is HEALTHY, while competition phase training is UNHEALTHY.

I have learned a lot by studying your training methods, and am grateful that you are willing to share them. Could it be that you would say that training that requires less than one day for recovery is healthy, and training that requires three, four, five…days for recovery is unhealthy?

If this distinction between healthy and unhealthy is useful, then the first step on the path to world records might be to find ways to perform training that currently is UNHEALTHY for the athlete (and therefore cannot be done for a long period of time) in a way that is HEALTHY.

For example, maybe it is that HEALTHY training is healthy because only one system of the body is being embarrassed, while UNHEALTHY training is unhealthy because many systems of the body are being embarrassed at once.

I think you write to letsrun not to turn to us for advice but to help us be better at training and coaching-thanks again for doing this-so I am interested to hear if you plan the training for your athletes in terms of HEALTHY and UNHEALTHY.

I used to think 3:26 by El G was fishy... However when you see someone like Kyle Merber run 3:34 I have no problem reasoning a super talent with a work ethic like El G could run that clean.

You see so many guys in college running really fast times off of just 70-80 mpw, with terrible strides, weaknesses... No cohesive lifestyle. I think the tip of the spear is much sharper than most think.

Combing Talent, lifestyle, and a comprehensive training approach building year after year.... The bar is much higher than we think.

Brain in ice water wrote:

J.R. wrote:

This is total nonsense.

Only to you.

Indeed, there are many more sane people besides me.

Your question can open an interesting discussion, including not only methodology and physiology, but phylosophy too.

When you look at the top in any human activity, your life is Healthy or Unhealthy ?

If you are a singer who travels almost every day for havinbg concerts in different places, and you eat when you can, and you sleep in a motorhome, and you live in a ambience where it's normal to take some drug and to drink a lot of liquors, this is a healthy, or a unhealthy life ?

If you are a scientist using a microscope 18 hours per day when you think to be close to find something new, your life is healthy or unhealthy ?

I think that a healthy life is something connected with a "tranquil" life, and the secret is to cancel (or at least to reduce) every stress which can produce hormonal and physical variations in your body and your mind.

So, my answer is NO, when we try to reach the top of our possibilities working at the maximal level of intensity, continuity and motivation, training is not HEALTHY.

The alternance among unhealthy periods of hard and continuous preparation, and periods of recovery (not only physical, but nervous and psychological too), is the only system we can use for maintaining a good balance in our body and our mind, in spite of some training that is "out of balance" for definition.

The main problem for a coach is to reach the border between training and overtraining, without overtaking it. If we have a training of good but not maximal intensity (where for intensity I mean not only the level of quality, but also the level of volume), we stay in a HEALTHY area, but the stimuli are not strong enough for bringing an athlete to his top. So, if this is the final goal, we need to "force" some session till the limit, and our real problem is to alternate this training (unhealthy) with rest and recovery, in order to become again "healthy" in short time, in order to be able to work again in "unhealthy" way, not after long periods, but after short time.

This is the reason because, at top level, the most important point is the "periodization" : everybody knows the elements of the preparation, but not many coaches know how to alternate rest, easy recovery and hard training, in order to peak when you need to be in your max shape.