Altitude mask is full BS

The thin air of high altitude has long been recognized as a training superpower for athletes. If you live and train at high altitudes, chances are you’ll be mopping your floors with your low-lying competitors. As such, elite runners often move to mountain towns, either temporarily or permanently, to adapt to the altitude. Wouldn’t it be great if you could do the same thing without getting on a plane?

That’s the idea behind the High Altitude Training Mask. Wearing the straps for a gym session can train your body to do more work with less oxygen. I’ve seen one as cheap as a dollar. Much more affordable than spending the summer in Colorado. But do they work? Unfortunately, no.

High altitude training is more than just training time

The advantages of high altitude in training are life Advanced and not training there. Even if you could teleport to a boulder every time you jogged, you wouldn’t gain any adaptations for high altitude.Advanced “training” required at least 12 hours a day Stay in air with a low partial pressure of oxygen.

When the air you breathe has less oxygen than it is used to with each breath, your body takes action. A hormone called erythropoietin, or EPO for short, responds by telling the body to make more red blood cells. This does not occur when oxygen is deficient for a short period of time during a workout. It often happens. This allows you to get the benefits of living at high altitude while providing plenty of oxygen during your workout.

The mask doesn’t actually mimic altitude

Wearing a mask for a workout actually does the opposite for athletes: YBreathe a normal amount of oxygen throughout the day and limit it when you need it most. You don’t get the EPO boost, essentially making your workout harder for no reason.

There is another reason why masks don’t actually mimic altitude: Rlimit the amount Breathing air volume is not the same as breathing down pressure of air. You’re still getting sea level air, you have to work harder to breathe it in. This one It shows that training with a mask does not improve fitness over training without a mask.

How to improve your cardio fitness

If you want to reduce shortness of breath during exercise, what you really need is to improve your aerobic fitness.The way to do that is to do lots of aerobic exercise of varying intensities.

Low-intensity aerobic exercise builds adaptations that help your body take in and use more oxygen. High-intensity aerobic exercise (like his true HIIT) pushes the body into different adaptations. And training in the middle, sometimes called lactate threshold, has its own benefits. likewise. Endurance athletes do a combination of all these types. (Detail is Benefits of different zones of aerobic exercise here.)

This means that you want to get enough oxygen when you are doing cardio. Your body can do the workout you want. If you’re lifting instead, oxygen uptake is even less important because you don’t need as much oxygen. in the meantime Your lift will only recover during those short efforts.