When I think of recovery and altitude, my first thought is that altitude impedes recovery. That’s a correct assumption if you assume that you are not acclimatized and you were planning to stay at altitude during your recovery period. However, that’s not how it works when you’re sleeping in an altitude tent for cardio improvement. Here’s why!
One of the benefits of sleeping in an elevation tent is that you’re able to “ascend” slowly. We’ve written a separate article about acclimatization here, so please check it out if you haven’t already. Assuming you haven’t gone too high, too fast, your body is fully adjusted to altitude and so your recovery during sleeping hours is no better/no worse than had you been at your home elevation.
The main benefit of sleeping at altitude is that your hemoglobin mass increases along with your red blood cell count.
During the day, when you’re at your home elevation, you’ll be in a hyperoxic state. You’ll be acclimatized to the tent elevation, but you’ll be spending your waking hours at a much lower elevation. At the lower elevation during the day, your body is able to deliver more oxygen to your muscles (and brain) than it normally would, so your recovery times are improved during waking hours.
Extra credit – use a chilled sleeping pad. As a bonus, you can combine an altitude tent with a chilled sleeping pad. The benefit of the pad is that when sleeping in an environment that’s slightly below room ambient temperature, your sleep quality improves. Both REM and SWS (deep) sleep durations improve so recovery times will also improve. When combining the two, your recovery score is affected both during sleep and during waking hours. We have partnered with ChiliPad to provide water-cooled sleeping pads that are fully compatible with the MountainAir® altitude tent. You can read more about that here.
In summary, if recovery times are important to you, sleep at altitude and spend your day at your home elevation (sleep high/train low). If you want to further improve recovery scores, combine the altitude tent with a chilled sleeping pad.
~by Andrew Jacobs of Mountain Air Health, maker of automatically controlled altitude simulation systems for cardio improvement and weight loss
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