Hi,
I am living at 1650m and wondering if using supplemental oxygen during TR workouts and zwift races makes sense. Anyone on this forum looked into it and used it? What were your experiences and what was the cost associated with your setup?
TIA
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Interesting question. I live at 1850m and often ride higher. The usual thing is to live/sleep high and train low, which would suggest using O2 while training would be good, simulating training at lower elevation. One of drivers there is that the events that count will be at lower elevation. So, IDK.
I asked ChatGPT and it said, for a number of stated reasons, that using supplemental O2 while training at altitude doesn’t provide a meaningful benefit.
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You are not all that high at all and if you live there you will be well adapted anyway.. Supplementary oxygen is really something for attempting an 8,000m peak.
I guess the real question I am asking is O2 saturation of the lung alveoli possible at a PO2 lower than sea level using 100% oxygen.
Although most pro teams go higher, 1,650m elevation is not an uncommon elevation for altitude camps. From what I understand, there is about 17% less oxygen availability that 1,650, and studies suggest about a 6% drop in performance for athletes coming up there from sea level. Are you suggesting that this is not significant and/or those of us who live at elevation would not have a meaningful increase in performance at sea level?
For training I think this is a thing but for racing it’s mildly cheating.
Joe
I would be cautious with supplemental oxygen. Pure oxygen has the reputation to not be healthy, especially for long term use. That is the reason that hospitals are very cautious with how they prescribe oxygen, unlike paramedics. Firefighters here do not use medical oxygen, but just normal air.
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I don’t think his question was whether it’s high enough to need supplemental oxygen in the way that it’s used on 8000m peaks…
He was asking about supplemental oxygen as it relates to performance in training. While probably a bit of an edge case or uncommon…it’s a great question. 1700m is plenty high enough to notice pretty pronounced effects of altitude on your performance. There’s plenty of anecdotal (and possibly researched but I haven’t looked for it) information and feedback from pros and others that like to train for certain periods at lower altitudes simply because it allows for more more work, better recovery, higher power, etc.
Readily having access to low altitude (high oxygen) and higher altitude (lower oxygen) environments could definitely be advantageous depending on where your training is limited.
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Exactly, having ridden down at sea level since moving to altitude the difference is very apparent.
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I looked into this a little and then gave up because it seemed too expensive and complex. Pure medical grade oxygen is not cheap or easy to get, any delivery device/tube/mask is generally made for people just staying alive with pneumonia or whatnot and not doing 60+ liters/minute. Oxygen concentrators like you see old people with in nursing homes where they have tubes in their noses don’t provide near enough volume. Scuba tanks are logical to try but seem like they just use compressed air that already exists……so those won’t add oxygen unless you have them shipped from sea level which nobody’s gonna do. They’re also not made to use/expel that much air, as no one’s scuba diving at maximal oxygen capacity. I think most people are trying to use as little energy as possible while scuba diving so they can dive for as long as possible without having to go back for another tank.
It makes 100% logical sense if you live at 2000m or so that supplementing with oxygen during hard efforts would be advantageous. It’s the same concept of live high, train low…..except you don’t spend an hour+ riding/commuting to sea level. It also begs the question could you train at 1000 feet below sea level (aka greater than 21% oxygen concentration) and get a bigger effect.
I do know if you screw up the ratio you can legit hurt/poison yourself from having too much oxygen, but I don’t know what that exact ratio is. So you need precise equipment that gets the ratio perfectly, and a tight fitting mask that also allows you to expel a bunch of air. Basically you need one of those vo2 max lab testing setups (that probably cost 20k), but to then add your own supplemental oxygen to that mask somehow.
IIRC there is a company that makes a device, and it’s basically an oxygen concentrator that old people use but you turn it on hours in advance and it builds up a huge volume of air in a big plastic bag the size of a half a bedroom and then you use that oxygen to exercise with through their propriety mask. It was like 5k+ for the setup.
Yeah, that’s a good question. I assume it all depends on what an individual’s bottleneck is for aerobic power. At some point, I believe you can have more o2 than the body is able to turn into work. Even at sea level or above, I’m not sure increasing o2 concentration is always going to guarantee increased aerobic power (if something else is the limiter).
A little bit of google/chat gpt suggests that somewhere around 3-5% performance is still on the table up to around 40% oxygen, after which the limiters are elsewhere in the body
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Interesting for sure. Unfortunately the full paper is behind a pay wall, but if someone could find it, often they’ll say exactly what equipment they used, masks used, and the how it was setup within the paper so someone else can test/replicate the results.
That could be a good place to start for a theoretical home setup. Sometimes for this kinda stuff it’s 50k lab equipment with every participant coming in 1 by 1 into the lab, and sometimes it’s surprisingly simple and cheap.
Edit: nevermind….
All trials were performed inside a Multi-place Class “A”
18,000 l hyperbaric chamber (National Hyperbarics (Pty.)
Ltd., Hull, UK), of length 3.5 m and diameter 2.5 m built to
Lloyd’s and ASME 1 PVHO speciWcations. The oxygen
concentration of the air was continuously monitored using
an oxygen sensor (Oxa 001, Scottish Anglo Environmental
Protection Ltd.) placed at the level of the subject’s head
while in the riding position. When the Fi
O2 dropped 1.0%
below the required percentage, 100% oxygen was fed into
the chamber until the required Fi
O2 was achieved. Temper-
ature and humidity were maintained between 19 and 21°C
and 60–70%, respectively during all trials, and pressure
was maintained equivalent to sea level for all trials.
The order of testing was randomized so that six subjects
performed NORM-TT Wrst and Wve subjects performed HI-
TT Wrst. The order of the constant workload trials, NORM-
CW and HI-CW, was also randomized. Subjects were
blinded to the oxygen content of the air and were not
informed of the hypothesis of the study. Trials were sepa-
rated by a minimum of three days to allow recovery
between trials, and subjects were instructed to refrain from
heavy physical exercise the day before trials and to main-
tain their training for the duration of their involvement in
the study.
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Depends on whether you are after better performance during a workout, or are after a better stimulus to adapt and improve from the workout. The better stimulus comes from being in the lower oxygen environmrnt.
That’s the purpose behind the “Live high, train low” mantra and why I would think the idea of training with added oxygen would work (although as shown above, quite marginal). The more oxygen available to you while training the higher the numbers and presumably therefore a higher training stimulus. Then “living” with a lower oxygen availability when not training will illicit better long term adaptations anyway.
The amount of time that you are actually training is relatively small when compared to the rest of your day so the critical time for altitude adaptation is the other 20+ hours of your day.
The only piece you would be missing then would be the improved recovery from living at sea level in between workouts.
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The reason why the pro teams stay high up in the Sierra Nevada for their camps and then drop down 7,000 feet do do their intervals is because they’re after better performance during workouts and hypoxia related adaptations off the bike.
Unfortunately, the last two weeks they got snowed in and had to do workouts up at elevation, something they really didn’t want to do.
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For training I think this is a thing but for racing it’s mildly cheating.
Disagree, just trying to close the gap on my sea level competitors
“Just trying to get my testosterone level back to where it used to be”
I guess you consider athletes who use altitude training to be cheating as well.