[Altitude Centre]

Chronic or long term Hypoxia is bad for you and can be responsible for illness and disease. Bad breathing can create chronic hypoxia that goes unnoticed and wrecks slowly. Acute (short term) Hypoxia that you practice in breath holds and with Intermittent Hypoxic Training, puts the body under hypoxic stress for a relatively short period of time (Intermittent = 5 Hypoxic air, 5 minutes ambient air) and produces a training effect that enables the body to deal with oxygen more efficiently. So when you are not practicing breath holds or IHT you have an enhanced oxygen transport and utilization system which prevents chronic hypoxia from occuring. Research has shown that training with Hypoxia produces no significant impacts on simple and complex opto-motor coordination during short-term breathing with 10% oxygen. Similarly, during long term elevations above 5350m of more than 15 days, the response to a memory task was significantly enhanced.