Altitude Training

The human body is extremely adaptive, and it is through adaptation to stress that we physically become stronger. In the early stone age it was probably already realized that if you lift around enough rocks, you become stronger. The concept of exercise has been around for quite a while now.

While weight and muscular training have evolved much from the primitive stone lifting/hurling, endurance training has really not evolved much. Even with treadmills and exercise bikes, one still preformed the same motion over and over again, and the rate of gain in endurance is still painfully slow.

I think endurance is simply how well your body uses the oxygen you take in and how much oxygen you take in at once. If one runner can intake and process more oxygen than another, then his metabolism will eventually outlast the other runner, given that they have the same amount of stored energy. So what better way to train our lungs and bodies how to use oxygen other than to deny our lungs oxygen?

There are already expensive gyms out there which depressurize their interiors a little in order to simulate high elevations, but those buildings are hardly cheap to maintain and the price of admission is not worth it for the average jogger. And besides, once such a facility reaches a certain level of occupancy, the amount of carbon dioxide generated by occupants in an already thin-aired environment could pose serious problems.

I am thinking of a small compact exercise mask or tube which houses a small catalyst which converts a small portion of the oxygen we breathe in into something unusable by the body, such as carbon dioxide. At teh very most it would resemble a gas mask, relatively easy to carry around, and could be easily adjusted. Run a few laps each day with one of these things reducing the perceived oxygen concentration from 20 to 10 percent while still maintaining the same volume of air you must process should make it almost dangerous to go directly back to normal oxygen concentration, at which point sprinting a mile should not even hasten your breath.