Are You a "Responder" to Altitude Training?

Figuring out who will benefit from altitude training is trickier than expected.

Saturday, December 7, 2013, 1:09 pm

Some people respond to altitude training; others don't. That's been the conventional wisdom for at least a decade, based on studies that have found big differences in the individual response to altitude exposure. More recently, the "responder vs. non-responder" analysis has become much more common in all sorts of sports science papers. Overall, I think this is a great trend, recognizing the kind of individual differences in response that David Epstein writes about in The Sports Gene.

Still, there's a danger in slapping on the "responder" and "non-responder" labels too freely, as a very interesting study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine illustrates. It's an Australian study on players from Collingwood Football Club who took part in two altitude training camps separated by a year. In some respects, the results were just what you'd expect: in each camp, some athletes responded strongly to the stimulus and displayed big increases in hemoglobin mass, while others had a negligible response.


But here's the rub: among the players who completed both camps, the responders in the first camp weren't the same as the responders in the second camp. Here's how the results scattered:

The y-axis shows percentage change in hemoglobin mass (one of the key markers of improved oxygen carrying capacity in the blood) after the first camp. The x-axis shows the same thing for the second camp, with each dot representing a single athlete. If there was something innate about being a responder, you'd expect all the dots to be clustered along a line stretching from the lower left to the upper right of the graph -- e.g. those who scored low values in the first camp would also score low values in the second camp, and same for high values. Instead, the dots are scattered pretty much all over the place. In other words, you can't use the results of the first altitude camp to predict who will benefit from the second camp.

So what does this mean? There's a very big difference in someone who gets an 8% boost in hemoglobin and someone who gets no boost at all, so what explains this? One additional observation was that athletes whose hemoglobin values were lower at the start of each camp were slightly more likely to see increases during that camp, which makes intuitive sense.  It's possible that responder status depends on your specific pre-camp status -- i.e. fluctuations in your hemoglobin levels and perhaps training status and so on-- rather than some innate trait.

At this point, the science of altitude training is too complex to draw any firm conclusions. But the more general point is worth keeping in mind. Yes, all sorts of training interventions have individual variability in response -- but just because something doesn't work for you once, don't assume that you're a "non-responder." That sort of label can only be applied when a pattern is consistently observed in multiple independent trials.

