Hypoxico Featured in Mens Fitness Magazine!!
As Dan Puder, an MMA fighter, shadowboxes in a sealed room at the Fortune gym on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, a small machine whirs in the corner, steadily sucking oxygen out of the air. That little contraption makes his body think it’s working out at 12,000 feet above sea level, so it starts manufacturing extra red blood cells to carry what little oxygen there is to his muscles. By the time Puder’s done, his body has developed so much extra oxygen capacity that when he walks out of the gym and into the afternoon sunshine, he’s taking in 20% more oxygen than just about anyone else on the street. “It’s crazy” he says. “I feel like Superman?’
Puder is among a growing legion of athletes singing the praises of hypoxic training, which simulates high altitudes in controlled environments. When hypoxic gear was first introduced in the late ’90s, it was primarily embraced by the Olympic and cycling worlds. Lance Armstrong started using climate tents in 2001 to simulate the soaring climbs of the French Alps, and his win in that year’s Tour de France led his rivals to do the same. The Air Force uses hypoxie gear to train fighter pilots. And it’s positively de rigueur with the mountain-climbing and adventure set.
But in the past year, hypoxic training has begun to move into mainstream sports. According to the Boulder-based Colorado Altitude Training, the Phoenix Suns and Philadelphia Flyers have added $40,000 climate chambers to their training facilities. And, as Puder demonstrates, it’s making its way into MMA. The reasoning behind this growth extends even beyond the training benefits. “With drug testing getting more strict, athletes have a choice” Puder says. “Try to beat the tests or find a natural edge.”
If he’s not doing supersets in the sealed workout rooms, the spiky-haired Puder, a college wrestler who got his big break on the WWE’s show Tough Enough, runs on a treadmill with a mask that simulates the air in the Peruvian Andes. At night, he sleeps under a tent that makes him feel as if he’s 9,000 feet above sea level in Sri Lanka. That metabolic trip around the world is all about helping him keep his edge in the ring. “Fifteen minutes of fighting is a long time” he says. “By the third round, you’re wiped. This helps me fight longer, harder. A lot of MMA guys are doing it.”
Puder discovered hypoxic training two years ago while transitioning to MMA. “In the WWE, I was lifting seven days a week, as heavily as I could” he says. “But MMA is all about cardio.” He had run up a 20-0 amateur record as a heavyweight when an instructor offered him a hypoxic mask. Puder wore it for four months while training for a September 2007 rifle match broadcast live by Yahoo! Sports from the Playboy Mansion. “I could feel the endurance difference,” he says. He won in a unanimous decision.
Realizing he’d hit on a key to increasing his stamina, Puder called Hypoxico, a leading supplier, and asked them to lend one of their glass climate chambers to his trainer, Justin Fortune, who owns a boxing gym on the Sunset Strip. Fortune was initially skeptical, but now he’s a convert. “The benefits are unreal,” he says. “High altitude kicks your metabolism to a whole new level.”
Four times a week, Fortune puts his boxing clients through 30-minute workouts broken up with occasional half-minute breaks. Their routines range from mitt and heavy-bag work to circuit training with seven 10-rep sets per exercise. On alternate days, he puts a mask on them and has them walk on a treadmill for 25 minutes at an incline. Puder says his hematocrit level, the standard measure of red blood cells, has risen by at least 7%, to 46.8, in the past year. Most pro sports don’t check for hematocrit levels, but a reading of 50 is enough to get cyclists banned from the Tour de France.
Our kidneys have internal sensors that can tell when there’s a drop in oxygen, and they respond by making EPO, the hormone that prompts the body to make red blood cells. Since a cyclist who lives in Salt Lake City has more of those cells than one who tides in Dallas, why shouldn’t the Texan be able to naturally balance things out? The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) found itself curiously flummoxed when it considered that question in 2006. Its Ethical Issues Review Panel said the chambers violated the “spirit of sport,” and a high-ranking official called them “tacky.” But seven dozen doctors from around the world wrote a passionate defense, insisting that “altering the ambient oxygen concentration requires no more passive use of technology than getting into a car, turning on the ignition, and driving to the top of a mountain.” WADA ultimately agreed.
Given what amounts to a free pass, the drug-tested sports world is starting to give hypoxic training a second look. So are others. Larry Kutt, president of Colorado Altitude Training, insists his gear is tailor-made for anyone who hits the gym hard day after day. “The red blood cells are like trucks that deliver oxygen to the muscles” he says. “The more oxygen muscles get, the faster they can recover.” Victor Conte, the founder of BALCO (Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative), backs up the sentiment. “I learned during my years of work with elite athletes that increasing hematocrit levels can provide a huge benefit in terms of enhancing recovery during and after intense workouts,” he says. Puder, who’s working with Conte on a line of supplements that he claims will boost the hypoxic high, insists he’s living proof. “My muscles don’t break down as quickly as they once did,” he says. “Within eight weeks I saw a 25% gain in my overall cardio.”
I wanted to get a feel for the stuff myself, so I visited Hypoxico’s offices on Manhattan’s West Side. The two men who greeted me were youthful, eager, and–oddly–both named Matt. They led me to an ordinary-looking conference room that felt like the cabin of a 747. While we make small talk, a 50-pound generator starts removing oxygen from the air and piping it into the room. It runs through a small box that looks like a dehumidifier and wheezes like Darth Vader as it circulates the oxygen-deprived air. It is set to take 6% of the oxygen out of the air, which means we might as well be in Colorado. “When the first machines came out, they were used by specialists,” Matt Eckert, the company’s vice president, explains to me. “Now, an average soccer mom can walk in for 30 minutes and walk out feeling as if she’s just run for an hour.”
I nodded, wondering whether soccer rooms are really the market for this. Then I remember something Fortune told me: The most popular use for his chamber is hot yoga. Just as I started to believe maybe this really is the next wave, it occurred to me that I was laboring to breathe, and my chest burned like hell. As it turns out, the compressor had taken us up another 6,000 feet. I suggested that maybe it’s a good idea for us to continue our chat at sea level.
A 45-year-old Wall Street exec named Cynthia was in the showroom eyeing a portable mask for a trip she was about to take to the highest point in the Western Hemisphere, Argentina’s Mount Aconcagua. “Tour guides rush you up,” she explained. “Even big strong guys get wiped out. If you want to enjoy yourself, you need to get your body acclimated.”
Despite its emerging acceptance among athletes and adventurers, we’re still a long way from having a hypoxic chamber in every health club. Eckert’s partner, Matt Formato, figures it will take another year or two before we’ll see hypoxic spin classes in the local gym.
That’s why Puder may not be the best bellwether of hypoxic’s future. It might be his girlfriend, Playboy model Amanda Evans. The 27-year-old had a WTF expression when Puder broached the idea of putting a hypoxic tent over their California king-size bed last spring. “It looked really intimidating, and I was scared to fall asleep in it,” she recalls. “I didn’t know if I’d be able to breathe.” But after a few weeks of settling in at the equivalent of a 10,000-foot elevation, she no longer had trouble getting a full night’s sleep. “You also get that deep quality of sleep,” she says. She also noticed that a steep six-mile run near their Hollywood home stopped being a chore.
And then there’s the sex. “You can do anything you want,” she coos. “The only downside is you get winded quickly. But then when you get back out into the fresh air, I mean, wow!”
It’s still too early to determine if hypoxie training will be worth the trouble for regular guys. Gary Wadler, M.D., who studies hypoxic gear as the chairman of WADA’s Prohibited List and Methods Subcommittee, says that there’s no guarantee that a $7,000 tent will work as well for Joe the Plumber as it does for Puder. “There’s tremendous individual variability that makes it hard to predict who will benefit” he says. More worrisome to Wadler are the muscle-heads who will try to cut costs by using homemade setups. “In a highly controlled, hospital-level environment, the equipment probably isn’t dangerous,” he says. “But if you’re using inferior equipment, there’s a potential to get a severely low intake of oxygen that could result in irreparable damage to the brain.”
While making the products more cost-effective may ultimately determine the longevity of hypoxic training, the gear appears here to stay in mixed martial arts and other drug-tested sports. In an A-Rod-scandal-rid country, “the best thing about it,” says Puder, “is that it’s not considered cheating.”
By: Shaun Assael