Cycling-Inform Altitude Training Demo for Cyclists

We recorded this video at the 2012 November Bright Boot Camp. In this video David Heatley performs an Altitude Training demo with a cyclist to show the effects of Altitude training and how it can be beneficial for cyclists wanting to improve their performance.

We run personalised Altitude Training sessions in our cycle studio at Highett in Melbourne. Bookings are essential.  Want to give it a try? If you are interested in doing a no-obligation free Altitude Training session please contact us using our contact us page.

Transcript from this video:

David Heatley: Okay. Thanks, guys. We’re just going to do a bit of demo on altitude training, now. I was very excited about altitude training when it first out. I’ve done a bit of mountaineering, and I know what to expect when you get into high altitudes. They were able to produce some machines recently cheap prices. We got into altitude training big time, and it’s fantastic. We’ve got David here. Now David, on a good day, can pull…you can do about what, 280 watts for about an hour?

David S: Ah..

David Heatley: On a good day?

David Heatley: Yeah.

David Heatley: Yep, about there? All right. Okay, so we’re going to get David to pull 150 watts. All right, this little thing here just measures the oxygen saturation. If you ever go into the hospital and they wire into the machine, the first thing that happens is they get your pulse and your oxygen saturation. Generally, at sea level, you would normally run around 98 or 99 or 100 if you’re a generally healthy human being.

What we tell people on altitude training, all this machine’s doing, is just extracting oxygen from the air that he’s breathing. It’s not quite the same as climbing up to the top of the mountain and sitting at three, three, five thousand feet or five thousand meters, because you don’t have that pressure. It’s all unpressurized. What we do, is we’re able to simulate the reduction in oxygen, and we’re able to reduce the blood-oxygen saturation level. When we do that, that stimulates or triggers your body to start producing more red blood cells and also improve your efficiency.

What we’re going to do here is, we’re just going to put this little on David’s finger, and it will give me a number. Hopefully, that number’s not too shabby, because we’ve just got the machine idling at the moment. David’s sitting on 98. Okay, so that’s perfect. He’s operating at about sea level, and that’s the number that we would expect to see at sea level. What we’re going to do, we’re just going to crank it a little bit.

[Laughter]

David’s just going to hold 150 watts. What we’ll see in the next couple of minutes, it’s very quick. The machine is just starting to kick in. It takes a little while for it to… It’s just starting to restrict the amount of oxygen. We’ll see the bag here, and you’ll see that David will stop having to breathe. At the moment, David is not having to breathe very hard at all. The bag’s fully inflated. Now, he’s starting to have to breathe. It’s just dropped down to 96.

Audience: What is his Heart rate doing?

David Heatley: Heart rate will start increasing as well, because he’s having to work a bit harder. It’s just dropped to 96. You’ll see that he’s actually to start to breathe pretty heavily. It just dropped down to 95.

Audience: What’s the level of oxygen at sea level?

David Heatley: What’s that?

Audience: What’s the level of oxygen at sea level?

David Heatley: Normally, at sea level, I think it’s at quite to be honest it’s now at 21 percent, I think.

Audience: And what do the machine go down to?

David Heatley: Look, it’s a guess… I think this machine goes down to about 17 or 12 percent, but I don’t quite know…. It’s the equivalent around 5,000 vertical meters. How you going, David? Good, all right, okay. So David now he’s dropped to 87 percent. Now, if you were to walk into a hospital… Anybody work as a nurse here or work in a hospital?

Audience: I do.

David Heatley: Okay, where does the alarm start going off?

Audience: Ninety to ninety-one.

David Heatley: What’s that?

Audience: Ninety to ninety-one.

David Heatley: Ninety to ninety-one, okay. He’s sitting on 85 at the moment. So you’d have the nurses run in there and go, “What’s happening?”

Audience: We’d give him oxygen.

David Heatley: You’d start giving him oxygen.

[Laughter]

David Heatley: All right, well, we’re not going to do that today.

[Laughter]

David Heatley: He’s sitting about 82. On a scale of one to ten, David, how hard are you riding?

David S: Ah, eight or nine.

David Heatley: About an eight? On a scale of one to ten? He’s only producing 150 watts. Now, 150 watts, you can ride to about 25 to 28 an hour. A flat road and you’re producing about 150 watts. That’s how hard David S’s riding his bike at the moment, but he feels like he’s riding at probably about 45 kilometers an hour.

The great thing about altitude training is that we can start exercising your blood oxygen transport system at really large intensities. We can do this as a recovery session, but we’re actually working athletes pretty hard.

There are symptoms after doing an altitude training session. There’s two things that usually happen, after they do an altitude training session. The first thing is that it really knocks you out. When I started doing altitude training, I’d do one hour on the bike, and then I’d go and I’d sleep for three in the afternoon. It knocked me right out. The other thing is that it makes you really hungry.

David Heatley: You okay? You’re nice and settled there?. He’s sitting about 80, he’s breathing quite hard, and he’s producing about 150 watts. We just going to crank the machine up just a fraction more.

Audience: Ah.

David Heatley: You all right? All right. We’ll get to the point, and I just want David to hold about 150 watts. He’s dropping to 77.

Audience: Wow.

David Heatley: Yep. Now, we usually won’t take people past the high 70s, generally. He’s around 77. Obviously, he’s basically, the machine’s not able. It’s just starting to run to the point where the machine’s not able to deliver enough oxygen, because he’s actually breathing pretty heavily. He’s dropped to 75. At some point. 74, 73. All right.

Audience: He might turn blue.

Audience: He must do a lot of this.

David Heatley: Yep, it’s pretty scary numbers isn’t it?

Audience: Yes.

David Heatley: He’s still riding his bike. Now, that’s pretty impressive. He’s leveled it out. On a scale of one to ten, David?

David S: A 10.

David Heatley: Yeah, a 10, right? Okay. He’s working it pretty hard, so we’ll crank it back. I don’t want him to pass out. He’ll fall off his bike, and then he won’t be able to ride tomorrow. That wouldn’t be very good, would it?

Audience: How many altitudes sessions do you have to do?

David Heatley: Three session. About an hour a session, two to three sessions.

Audience: Do you have to do them all in the same week?

David Heatley: Yeah, you can actually. Yep. We just crank it back. I’ll show you how quickly. You see he’s sitting on 76. If we pull this off, I’ll show you how quickly he’ll recover. Usually, he gets a bit of a head rush right now while his body’s adjusting very quickly to the rush. Seventy-seven, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97.

Audience: Oh, he’s back. [Chuckle]

David Heatley: And he’s back. I expect 94, 95. A couple of more moments, and back up at 98. Yep, fantastic. Thank you very much, David.

David Heatley: Beautiful. Fantastic. Bravo. We really enjoy altitude training. It’s a great way you can get some good efforts in. Do them in a recovery. Get a really good workout. The great thing is that you’re working your blood oxygen transport system. The thing is that you noticed David’s having to breathe quite deeply. That’s actually quite tiring in itself. Actually, you start to exercise the diaphragm. What will happen is that, David’s training for the Tour of Bright at the moment. We’ll just give him a couple more moments on the bike just for his body to adjust. What will happen is, once he get’s past the toll gate on Hotham, he will find that the altitude will affect him less that the other riders who haven’t’ been going altitude training. That’s a bonus. The other thing is that he’s naturally increasing his blood, his hema count. Hema, what is it?

Audience: Hematocrit

David Heatley: Hematocrit count. He’ll be naturally increasing that, so generally, he’ll be riding more efficiently. He’ll be able to put out some really good power. The other thing is things like when you’re drinking from a bidon (drink bottle) you got for drinking. That kind that you need to catch up with your breathing? That’s real juiced as well. You’ll still see a little side effects. It will make you ride faster up hills, along the flat. Smack your buddies over and do better in races, without obviously being illegal. Any questions around altitude training.

Audience: Can you sleep with it on?

David Heatley: Yeah, you can actually. Generally, we recommend that people do active sessions. One of the issues about doing… There was, “sleep hard, train low” protocol. The big issue about that protocol—nothing wrong with that. It’s just as effective. The big issue with that is the recovery. It’s like you want to get good recovery at night if you’re exercising really hard during the day. The problem is if you’re going into an altitude tent night, you’re not getting good recovery. You wake up in the morning, you’ve got a splitting headache. You’re a bit dehydrated. You’ve been working hard all night. That impacts your ability to be able to train during the day. We generally recommend that if we lower the blood oxygen saturation three times a week, we get a very similar effect, without knocking around too much.

Audience: Do you cover Altitude training with a tent?

David Heatley: What’s that?

Audience: Do you cover Altitude training with a tent?

David Heatley: Altitude tent?

Audience: Yeah.

David Heatley: No, no. We just talk about this sort of altitude training.

Audience: How safe is altitude training?

David Heatley: How safe is altitude training?

Audience: Yeah.

David Heatley: When we’re running altitude sessions, we’re monitoring so we don’t obviously, we haven’t seen any athletes turn blue, but we’re monitoring their oxygen saturation. We sit them at a particular level that’s the optimum, so the sweet spot, yeah.

Audience: How much Altitude training do you need to do?

David Heatley: Oh, yeah, generally, we recommend a four to six week period on the altitude machine peaking for a particular event. Altitude training’s a little bit accumulative, in that the effect is like training: You can build on it. You can do a session for six weeks, and then you do your big race, or your big event. Then, you can go back and do another six-week block and you’re better to adapt a lot quicker. You get the effects quicker than if you were just coming cold. Generally, we’ve had athletes on it for three months. It really depends on how much time you’ve got available to do it.

Any other questions about altitude training? Fantastic. All right. We’ll, thanks very much, David. That was really, really good. Really good. Bravo.