[Anonymous]

Thanks to everyone for the great talk about the use of Normabaric Hypoxic tents and masks for acclimatization. It was great hearing from so many of you with experience in this area. We also spent time discussing acclimatization strategies. The document I am including here is just dealing with the Hypoxico tents and masks. I tried to include comments that arose during the meeting.

Like a knucklehead I forgot to record the meeting. I know, I know. I’m very sorry.
Scott

Topic

[Thomas Summer, MD]

Thomas Summer, MD on April 3, 2022 at 7:54 am #65001

I did both (active and passive) and I saw very good results. I think it’s most usefull to use the tent only for stimulating RBC production. For this purpose you don’t have to go that high, but you need about 200h (3-4 weeks) of time spent in the tent. I was shooting for a SO2 of 90-92% in the morning. That doesn’t impact sleep qualitiy and recovery too much. The active part (walking on a treadmill and breathing the air from the generator) is a bit more tricky. That’s highly individual and every person has to figure out how much she can tolerate. I saw SO2 as low as 60% and also passed out once. I found myself lying behind the treadmill. At first I didn’t know where I was, but fortunatelly the mask was stripped off my face;-) But I saw good adaptations and felt stronger with every workout. Part of this is also that you lern how to breathe correctly. But the breathing is almost the same as at real altitude. You have to be quite focused.
I have a friend who has great knowledge in the field, both practically and also scientific.

Höhentraining

unfortunatelly his website is only German. But for everyone who is really interessted in this stuff, feel free to contact him directly. His English is not too bad (for sure better than mine). I know that he is developing some cool test methods to figure out the individual response to altitude and altitude training and preaclimatisation. We agree that this won’t be of much use for highly trained individuals (at least in the beginning) who have a very good feeling for their body. But it should give the recreational athlete good data and a guidance of how much hypoxy is needed. A lot to come in this area.

So, breathe as if your life would depend on it!
Thomas

[Anonymous]

Anonymous on April 21, 2022 at 9:52 am #65831

Great input Thomas. Thanks for this information. I like the 200 hour part. I am curious when you say that you do not need to sleep very high in the tent to stimulate RBC. But won’t the RBC production plateau at a lower level if say you sleep at 2500m max compared to 4000m? I would think the RBC will continue to increase if you sleep higher.

Scott

[Thomas Summer, MD]

Thomas Summer, MD on May 5, 2022 at 1:18 am #66579

I wrote that a bit missleading. There is an individual threshold, where there is no more performance gain with sleeping higher in the tent. That’s also because of impacted recovery. Erytropoesis and further acclimatisation is then better achieved through active hypoxie.