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Blood donation

Thread Status: Hello , There was no answer in this thread for more than 60 days.
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perow1

New Member
Feb 28, 2005
279
22
0
I know that there are a previous post about freediving and blood donation, but i cannot seem to find it. Except for the safety issues involved, how is performance and training affected? Is your training somewhatt disturbed and your progress to if leaving blood?
 
I read somewhere here that eventhough blood volume is regained fast, blood quality takes a few months to get to the same level.
Don't know how/if it will affect your freediving/training.
 
The last time I donated blood I set a static PB just a few days later.

BUT

In those times my static was mostly limited by co2 tolerance, rich blood would (I guess) mostly affect your hypoxia tolerance.

Unless you're going to a competition or something within a few weeks, I'd say donating is pretty safe, you'll recover soon enough and the performance doesn't drop that much. Of course it's a good idea to take it easy for a couple of sessions and find those limits again. For competitive types, you might want to keep your blood and find other ways to help. It may take a long time to fully recover the blood levels, especially if the level was reached as part of a training program...

I've had hb levels in 180s and in 140s while diving and honestly I didn't see a huge difference in performance. Sure it's there, but mostly it seems good blood helps in the very end of a performance, when truly pushing the limit. For recreational or average depth diving, I wouldn't be to conserned as long as you have a few days to recover from it.
 
Last edited:
Thank you for your quick replies.

Since donating blood forces your body to replace the lost, may it be the other way around? Leaving blood stimulates blood production and in the long run you will benefit from your donation?

Very little of the training is done to an absolute maximum and maybe stimulated blood production may leave you with higher quality blood if you refrain from leaving blood for some time before maximum attempts. Or maybe your lost training and reduced performance for a while will casncel uot the hypothesised positive effect.

Ah, just a thought...
....leaving blood is done just to help nothing else.
 
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