m!ndweak wrote:
... what we know from studies is rhEPO makes 3-5% gains, and SIGNIFICANTLY increases the number and size of the mitochondria, which with the added number of rbc's there is more 02 in the blood, and with more mitochondria than NORMAL, more 02 is absorbed from the blood, this in turn allows for MORE production of ATP, which allows for the muscles to FIRE, contract and extended more often, etc...while maintaining a high pace effort in aerobic while everyone else is producing lactic acid by the boatloads cause they are already in anaerobic respiration.
the RBCs are a small part of the big reason why the runners are making HUGE gains on what they themselves dubbed "rocket fuel"
To tell the truth, that observation is more interesting than some of the other extra-Hct augmenting mechanism of rHuEPO proposed, but to put it in context, one shouldn't draw to much conclusions from one isolated paper with non-endurance trained athletes for the following reasons:
- The mitochondrial paper (Plenge et al) was published in 2012 and its key findings most likely had been published/presented even earlier. Are you aware of any exercise physiologists, anti-doping specialists or erythropoietin specialists commenting on the issue and finding the mitochondrial mechanism relevant, because going through literature reviews such as the one by Sgrò et al (2018), the study is mentioned in a few sentences and even the reviewers think it highlights the importance of oxygen delivery, writing a few sentences later that "Lundby et al investigated whether rHuEpo may have some further ergogenic effect on endurance performance other than augmenting oxygen transport [concluding that] the improvement in O2 blood carrying capacity can be the only factor explaining the ergogenic effect of rHuEpo on VO2max".
- If I am reading you correctly, you are concluding that a given increase in Hb/Hbmass should elicit higher increase in Vo2Max with rHuEPO vs. blood infusion? As far as I know, this didn't take place in the only research paper in which both Total Hb elevating mechanisms were tested (Ekblom et al, 1991) in well-trained individuals, but the opposite seem to have taken place. Even when the researchers tried to elicit similar increase in Hb, it increased slightly more in the rHuEPO group vs. reinfusion group (13.2 % vs 9.3 %) whereas Vo2Max (6.4 % vs. 7.9 %) and time-to-exhaustion (13.5 % vs. 15.5 %) were actually better in the reinfusion group despite smaller increase in Hb.
Nobody is claiming that there might not be something there, but it is strange that only a few specialists even bother to flirt with the mitochondrial material.