Athletes' Training Techniques May Make Dogs Faster

ByABC News
March 13, 2007, 11:15 AM

March 13, 2007 — -- A training technique that may have worked for Lance Armstrong is now being tried out on the star dogs of the Iditarod.

Jeff King, a four-time champion of the Iditarod Dog Sled Race, is trying a new training technique for his Alaskan huskies, and it's often used by many cross-country trainers and cyclists.

He converted a barn into a high oxygen chamber, mimicking oxygen levels about 8,000 feet above sea level.

Arleigh Reynolds, a veterinarian who works with King, describes the technique as "live high and train low."

Reynolds says that they came up with the idea of the oxygen chamber from former four-time Iditarod champion Doug Swingley. Swingley lives and trains his dogs in Montana at an altitude of about 6,000 feet.

King, who lives in Gooselake, Alaska, at an altitude of about 2,000 feet, decided to move the high altitude to his dogs, rather than move his dogs and family to a higher altitude.

He created a sleeping chamber for his dogs that simulated oxygen levels at an altitude of 8,000 feet above sea level. The dogs sleep in what is known as a "mild hypoxic state."

Hypoxic refers to the change in a mammal's body -- human or canine -- when it experiences low oxygen levels that exist at high altitudes.

Runners experience a shortness of breath at an altitude of 6,000 feet above sea level. Many people even have trouble sleeping at altitudes of 8,000 to 10,000 feet.

According to Reynolds, King first experimented with having half his dogs sleep in a hypoxic chamber, noting the physiological differences between the the two groups.

He found that the dogs sleeping in the hypoxic chamber had a high level of red blood cells and were also able to clear lactic acid 60 percent faster than the dogs not sleeping in the chamber. By the first week of November last year, King had all his dogs sleeping in the chamber.

Reynolds says that the changes in the physiology allow mammals to be "more efficient at processing oxygen, and they maintain these changes when they return to sea level, allowing the dog to achieve greater speeds in a race."

Joe Wakshlag is a musher -- person who drives a dog sled -- and an assistant professor of clinical nutrition at Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine.