Holding Your Breath For EPO
 

Hey everybody,
As i typed the title for this thread it dawned on me just how ridiculous and stupid this post may be. But here goes.
A few weeks ago I was sucked in to my usual youtube vacuum hole late one evening. I came across a short video where a guy explains how holding your breath for as long as you can, 3 times in a row, will make your body produce some EPO. Enough to make a noticeable difference if you do it right before physical activity. I remember googling this and found a lot of info on apnea training and similar methods.
I'm pretty scientifically illiterate when it comes to this stuff, so any thoughts, opinions, or personal experiences of this in regards to cycling would be appreciated.
Cheers guys n gals
~auslo

Dunno. Haven't tried it with my oximeter on. EPO signals the body to create more red blood cells (RBCs). That's all it does. It takes several weeks for those RBCs to mature and increase your blood's oxygen carrying ability. If you don't keep hitting them with EPO every few days, your body will scavenge them back out. So for sure it won't make any difference if you do it before a workout, thus absolutely no difference, noticeable or otherwise. Thus the whole thing is probably a crock.

Oh heck. It's generally accepted that your kidneys will produce EPO if blood oxygen saturation drops below 93%. So I put on my oximeter and did as suggested. My oxygen saturation stayed at 98%-99%. No movement. No, it doesn't work.

You might be able to do that, perhaps with swimming. Underwater swimming?

Another option would be hypoxic, or altitude training tents.

http://www.go2altitude.com/images/chamb1.jpg

It's actually true and have been studied and tested. I still free dive from time to time, but used to often about 8 years ago and I'm actually still a certified intermediate free-diver. My longest static breath hold is just under 5 minutes and I have completed dives over 85'. Although that may sound good it was actually below the class average. If you do several sessions of long breath holds followed by some breath up's (hyperventilation breathing) you will actually increase your red blood cells. I would do these based on a diving table daily to prepare for a dive trip.

Here is some info I found for reference:

Increased erythropoietin concentration after repeated apneas in hum... - PubMed - NCBI
Hypoxia-induced increases in red blood cell production have been found in both altitude-adapted populations and acclimatized lowlanders. This process is mediated by erythropoietin (EPO) released mainly by the hypoxic kidney. We have previously observed high hemoglobin concentrations in elite breath-hold divers and our aim was to investigate whether apnea-induced hypoxia could increase EPO concentration. Ten healthy volunteers performed 15 maximal duration apneas, divided into three series of five apneas, each series separated by 10 min of rest. Apneas within series were separated by 2 min and preceded by 1 min of hyperventilation to increase apnea duration and arterial oxygen desaturation. When EPO concentration after serial apneas was compared to baseline values, an average maximum increase of 24% was found (P < 0.01). No changes in EPO concentration were observed during a control day without apnea, eliminating possible effects of a diurnal rhythm or blood loss. We therefore conclude that serial apneas increase circulating EPO concentration in humans.

[h=1]Breath Holding to maximise sports performance by Patrick McKeown [/h]
[h=1]Increased erythropoietin concentration after repeated apneas in humans.[/h]
Increased erythropoietin concentration after repeated apneas in humans. - ResearchGate

One thing I read about hyperventilating while diving is that hyperventilating only marginally increases your O[SUB]2[/SUB], but significantly decreases the CO[SUB]2[/SUB]. The result is that it suppresses the breathing tendency to the point where a person could pass out.

It is ok to pass out in the open air, but very dangerous to do underwater.

So true, the term is known as "shallow water blackout" or SWB and sadly happens a lot to new free divers who just want to dive deeper and longer, but don't know the risk. To know and understand this limitation it's actually encouraged to practice at home on the couch so you can understand what it feels like before during and after you blackout. I've held my breath until I blacked out more than once. The seal who taught me how to dive said it's pretty common that they push so hard you blackout several times during the training.

This might be an interesting related journal review:

Advancing hypoxic training in team sports: from intermittent hypoxic training to repeated sprint training in hypoxia -- Faiss et al. 47 (Suppl 1): i45 -- British Journal of Sports Medicine

Interesting. I just don't suggest doing this and your regularly scheduled interval workout simultaneously. ;)

I think I'm going to give this a try. Here's my strategy:

First, measure hematocrit.

Purchase: 100 heparized hematocrit tubes ($20), 200 lancets ($1.50).

Household plumbing putty, measuring tape instead of dedicated microcapillary reader, and instead of buying a clinical centrifuge, I'll just tape the tube to a bicycle spoke and run it on my fluid trainer for 5 minutes.

Then start the breathing exercises. Looks like 135 minutes/day.

Should work fine.

Bloody hell.

Now everyone thinks they can be a (hemato)critic.

EPO can actually increase after several series of apnea as shown in the study LGHT above linked to it, but the question is for how long does this increase last and does it translate into better physical performance. To me, it sounds very unlikely this would have any practical meaning.

How does the increase in EPO you get through apnea compare to 500 units of synthetic EPO delivered intravenously (what Tyler Hamilton suggests was a typical daily "microdose")? I'm guessing the answer is "Inconsequential".

I don't like needles. Bring on the Xenon bong, man... :)

However one goes about creating extra endogenous EPO in the kidneys, its effect is to initiate the creation of red blood cells (RBCs), which when mature will enable the blood to carry more oxygen and thus increase performance. The trick is that our bodies are way too smart and are quick to scavenge stuff that is unneeded, such as muscle and RBCs. So if you don't keep doing whatever you did to create the extra EPO, as soon as you stop doing it the body will eat up those excess RBCs even before they fully develop. Lower EPO is a signal to do that.

I don't know the answer to how frequent the various interventions (apnea, VO2max intervals, high altitude) need to be in order to get the initial crop of RBCs developed and then to maintain their presence in the blood and thus get the performance improvement.