Mountain Climbing & Hiking
POWERbreathe At High Altitude
Anyone who has taken a trip to even a modest level of altitude (e.g. skiing or mountain hiking) will be familiar with the unnerving effect that it has upon your breathing. Tasks that would normally be a ‘breeze’ at sea level, suddenly leave you gasping for breath and wondering where all your fitness has gone. The explanation for the symptoms is simple, but not always well understood. At high altitude the air is ‘thinner’, containing less oxygen than at sea level. The higher we go, the thinner it gets. The effect of this is to make your breathing work harder to get the oxygen into your blood stream. For a given level of oxygen demand, you may need to breathe three, four, or even ten (at very high altitude) times as hard. At 3km (3000m) the amount of oxygen in the air decreases by 30%, and at 5km its half that at sealevel. This means that at around 1km you begin to experience breathlessness during moderate exercise, and at 4km you feel breathless at rest. POWERbreathe High Altitude Leaflet
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