[jome]

High RBC count and hemoglobin are obviously beneficial to breath holding ability.

Just don't make the mistake of thinking that just by eating tons of iron supplements, you will become a performance maniac. With hypoxic training you need to make sure you get ENOUGH iron. But, taking TOO MUCH for too long has serious health risks (and very easy to do).

The difference in performance is really finetuning. For example increasing your hb from 150 to say 170 will increase your total oxygen stores by a few percent. And for a person who's already fit, in good aerobic shape and has a pretty good blood, a jump so high is very unlike without some very serious hypoxic training.

So if you're a beginner, you will most certainly develop in huge leaps in other areas of apnea. If you're an experienced competitive diver looking for that "final edge", you might look into blood and iron supplementation. For a recreational freediver training semi regularly, I would say you will most likely get enough iron from your normal diet.

Iron absorbs notoriously bad, so just popping a bunch of supplements may actually be doing you no good. A few pointers:
-Avoid calcium intake at the same time as the iron (not on the same meal)
-Citrus fruits and vitamin-c help iron absorbtion
-Hemi-iron (animal based) helps non-hemi iron to absorb, so having a piece of meat with a veggie based iron-source helps it absorb.
-Hemi-iron absorbs generally 2-3 times better than non-hemi
-If the body is getting plenty of iron, it absorbs it less well, so taking tons of supplements have less and less benefit compared to the risks

The most important of these is calcium, which basically neutralizes the absorbtion...


Things are of course a little bit different women, who have a natural way of getting rid of extra iron and iron supplementing may be needed.