Study: Repeated breath holding increases EPO by 24%

Ive experimented with this because my lung capacity is pretty bad, how would this look practically? Hold your breath as long as you can once a day?

Read up on Emil Zátopek who won 4 Olympic medals and broke 18 world records. He would do a thing called hypoventilation training where he'd hold his breath while running. You're simulating altitude by using less oxygen. That could boost EPO and red cells. It could also build more lactate, training you to tolerate it better. It seems miserable as heIl, but if Zatopek is any indication, it could work.

You'd think that if there was anything to this, it would have gotten widespread publicity a decade ago among endurance sports, especially cycling, but I've never heard of it.

I have no idea if it works, but the protocol is explained in the study. It would be easy enough to do an experiment of one. But to be accurate, you'd need a blood draw for EPO before and after.

Here is what I found when I pulled up the study. I didn't read enough to figure out what it meant by first and last hypoxic exposure.

The change in EPO found in this study peaked at approximately 3 h after the last apnea—or 4 h 48 min after the start of the first hypoxic exposure—and returned to baseline 5 h after the last apnea.

https://sci-hub.st/10.1007/s00421-007-0639-9

A big issue is that the body is self-regulating so that once normal oxygen levels are achieved the process to create more RBCs is aborted. So you might have more EPO but that does not lead to more RBCs.

Yeah that's a good point, it's unlikely it would remain unknown if it had a large benefit, surely someone has tried it for competitive advantage.

It might be if you are training with a high enough load to be worried about marginal gains it would have little effect. And if you aren't, you should probably just run more if you want to get better. Could be a reasonable idea whilst injured, or perhaps when peaking for competition as you will be running less.

In high-school on easy runs for fun (no idea why we thought it was fun), we would all hold our breaths for as long as we could on runs lol. And well most of my prs are from hs so clearly it works ;)

Why is that? And why isn't it aborted after doing an easy run? as oxygen concentration will go to normal pretty much as soon as you have recovered from running. To be fair I'm not really sure of the mechanisms involved in creating epo or red blood cells :/

I've known about the benefits of breath holding since using that method to permanently get rid of asthma at age 5.

In grade school I used to walk around blowing all the air out of my lungs while tensing the muscles in my abs and poking them with all ten fingers.

Later in high school I would practice holding my breath in study halls aiming to get up close to a minute or so (don't recall exactly). People with asthma have a hard time holding their breath for 20 seconds. I went out for cross country and track in 10th grade, and won the league meet 880 by the end of the season.

In junior college I could hold my breath for close to two minutes while at the bottom of the swimming pool being timed by a friend. No hyperventilating was ever done, because that is the opposite of good breath holding practice and is dangerous.

I don't think that's true at all. There are probably all sorts of things that have a large benefit that people do that either aren't well known or other people don't consider them that useful even though they are.

No. Upon reflection, it would be much easier. EPO levels are only a proxy for running performance. The bottom line is whether it helps you run faster, not the EPO level.

The experiment of one would be to do an endurance time trial. Recover for a couple of days and then do the time trial again three hours after performing whatever the breath-holding protocol is.

Anyway, the link is posted if anyone wants to figure out the protocol... it's 3 sets of 5 reps of breath holding with a two-part recovery... ah, I didn't bother to figure it out, but it's in the study if you're interested.

My method in junior college was to lay on a flat surface on my back (bed, floor, couch, ground) with one hand up holding a stop watch to keep time. I would keep breathing less and less while relaxing more and more, then take one good relaxed breath (not all the way in, just relaxed), hold and time myself.

After that I'd stay relaxed, keep breathing as little as possible and then do it again, repeating three times. Usually each of the three breath holds would be longer and I'd go for max on the third one. This might be repeated once or twice a week at the most.

Not so coincidentally, my resting heart rate was 35 at the time, as checked on several different occasions. One of them was a physiology class where the instructor had each student go into an empty classroom, sit on a chair and have their pulse measured by a different student. Mine was measured twice and was 35 both times.

In my early 30s when competing from 5k through the marathon and in much better shape for endurance but not as fast for the mile my resting heart rate was 42 and I was not doing the breath holding practices at the time.

Whenever I do practice them they do have a good positive benefit for my health.

Fed Wilt and I talked about this back in the 70's. I ran it by my college coach, Wil Wright, at the time and he thought it was good enough that we did some workouts in the pool using this, as well as strides at the end of practice. It was called hypoxic training back then. While coaching in Australia, I had my athletes do a few strides twice a week holding their breath. Not sure I would implement it with all athletes today and I have no verifiable proof that it improved performance.

What I've wondered is whether pre-race breath holding would be a benefit.

When you hold your breath your spleen will release red blood cells. I'm not sure if that happens when racing, but even if it does, being boosted pre-race is probably a plus. Especially for something like the 800.

No you didnt.

Here is an update on that research. A team from China did an 8-week breath-holding protocol with untrained subjects. They had no significant increases in RBC, HGB, HCT.

Sorry.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Eight weeks of dry dynamic breath-hold training results in larger spleen volume but does not increase haemoglobin concentration

Purpose: It has previously been reported that repeated exposure to hypoxia increases spleen size and haemoglobin (HGB) level and recent reports on the effect apnoea has on spleen size and haematological parameters are contrad...

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