I was reading a post on Marv’s blog green-n-gold.com about an AT&T/NFL cribs-type show, this one featuring AJ Hawk. As Marv’s notes in his blog, this is more about pimping stuff for AT&T. You remember the movie The Truman Show? It’s like that.
Anyway, during the video I hear A.J. tell Deion Sanders that he had his bedroom converted into a hyperbaric chamber, and that it simulates sleeping at 9,000 feet. I heard him say the same thing on the Mike McCarthy show this week, too, and I thought - uh, somebody’s fooked here.
Either A.J. was sold a bill of goods, or those things they say about classes and studying vis-a-vis college football players is totally true.
I think a quick chemistry, biology and geophysics lesson is in order. Don’t worry. It’ll only hurt a little.
A hyperbaric chamber is a chamber (a heavy-gauge steel cannister) where the pressure is greater than normal atmospheric pressure. Into that cannister is pumped a greater concentration of Oxygen than normal air, the idea being the extra oxygen at higher pressure gets itself deeper into your tissues to help fight off free radicals, heal tissue, etc. Being in a hyperbaric chamber is like being thousands of feet below sea level.
Altitude training is a technique used to get your body accustomed to having less oxygen by being thousands of feet above sea level. Marathoners who train at altitude have faster heart rates and their hearts are doing less efficient work, along with a few other physiological limitations, all caused by the lack of oxygen at that elevation. One of the primary benefits to this training is that your body creates more oxygen-storing red blood cells, so it can make better use of the scarce oxygen your lungs take in at that elevation. The idea here is, when you come down from the mountain, your body has loads of extra red blood cells to carry oxygen to your muscles, making your body a more efficient collector and user of oxygen, making you a bit stronger and giving you better endurance (though it lasts only as long as it takes your body to re-adjust to being back at sea level). It’s like blood doping, only it’s NFL legal and without needles (hurray!). However, the lack of oxygen in altitude training also causes hypoxia, which actually harms your body’s ability to recover from injury. A lack of appetite and the consequential loss of muscle mass could also be a drag on someone expected to lift large men from the ground and break them on his knee.
So A.J., if the hardware you have in your home makes it like you’re sleeping at 9,000 feet, it’s not a hyperbaric chamber (unless you normally live in outer space). Another clue: unless they reinforced your walls, replaced your glass windows with plexiglass and sealed every nook and cranny in your bedroom/frankenlab to handle the added pressure, it’s not a hyperbaric chamber.
What you’re doing is like sleeping in the mountains at night, then coming down to play football in the day. I don’t know if you’re getting the full benefit of altitude training if you aren’t actually training at altitude. You’re altitude sleeping.
I give credit where it’s due: A.J. Hawk is investing in his body and is willing to turn his home a little bit freaky to give his body the best chance to survive extra years of beatings. I just hope he did more homework on the human biology of this than he did the terminology.
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