At the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, American distance runners earned a total of zero medals in front of their home fans. Two decades later, in Rio, they picked up seven medals in events between 800 meters and the marathon. What changed?
There are plenty of theories, including changes in training philosophy, the rise of sponsored all-star training groups, and the dissemination of knowledge on the Internet. But a new paper in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance argues that sports science also played a role. Essentially no American runners used altitude training to prepare for Atlanta. Then, in 1997, Ben Levine and James Stray-Gundersen published a paper introducing the concept of “live high, train low” (LHTL) altitude training. By 2016, every single one of the American medalists was using this approach.
LHTL involves spending as much time as possible in thin air (either in the mountains or in simulated altitude chambers) in order to trigger the production of hemoglobin-rich red blood cells to ferry oxygen to the muscles, but also descending regularly to lower altitudes for key training…
