Living at high altitudes and training at lower altitudes can help to improve an athlete’s performance.

Live high train low

For many years, it has been believed that endurance athletes can perform better by living and exercising at high altitudes. However, recently, doctors have questioned the effectiveness of this approach and propose that living at high altitudes and training at lower altitudes will better benefit the athletes. Some studies claim that by doing this, the performance of athletes may be improved by 1 to 2 percent.

Living at high altitudes where the oxygen levels are lower will cause the body to produce more red blood cells over time to compensate for the lack of oxygen in the body. However, athletes will not be able to optimize their training in high altitudes due to the lower oxygen levels. Their performance actually deteriorates and they may even suffer from muscle loss. But when athletes train at low altitudes, their higher concentrations of red blood cells enhances their strength, speed, endurance as well as recovery.

The live high train low concept capitalizes on the benefits of high altitude training and avoids the adverse effects of low oxygen levels during training. Athletes in various sports are believed to benefit from this concept of live high train low.
 

The hypothesis that living at high altitudes and training at lower altitudes can help improve an athlete’s performance is proven to be true.

This science fair project can also be done on other sports like swimming, cycling and triathlons.

This experiment can also be repeated using different levels of altitudes and different age groups of athletes.

As an alternative (and cheaper) way of conducting this experiment, consider replicating high altitude living conditions using an Altitude Tent (such as the Colorado Altitude Training system).