not breathing deeply while running

Bucky said:

You know how some Olympic athletes train in high altitudes, so that
their body get acclimated to the thinner air and performs at a higher
level when returning to sea level? Could you simulate the same thing
by not breathing as deeply while running (and therefore providing less
than maximum oxygen for you body?). (Sorry if this is a stupid
question.)

Yes. Run while holding your breath for AT LEAST 4 minutes without
breathing. Let me know how it goes.

Believe or not I actually saw some people wearing
"space helmet" like contraptions a few years back
to induce decreased oxygen.
I think some training shops these days have
hypo-baric cardio rooms to do this more comfortably.
A serious athlete may move to a moutain state for
a season or year round for such training. One of
the US Olympic camps is in Colorado Springs partly
for this purpose.

Bucky said:

You know how some Olympic athletes train in high altitudes, so that
their body get acclimated to the thinner air and performs at a higher
level when returning to sea level? Could you simulate the same thing
by not breathing as deeply while running (and therefore providing less
than maximum oxygen for you body?). (Sorry if this is a stupid> question.)

The purpose of running is to make your body (through stress) to work
more efficent. Running at the mountains just introduces more stress
which makes the body adapt faster. If you run normally or with
better (smarter) training your body will become more efficent which
makes you use less oxygen or use the same amount at a faster pace. It
would probably work but at the meets you might not be able to breathe
normally considering what you practice will show in the meets. My
advice just train.

Bucky said:

You know how some Olympic athletes train in high altitudes, so that
their body get acclimated to the thinner air and performs at a higher
level when returning to sea level? Could you simulate the same thing
by not breathing as deeply while running (and therefore providing less
than maximum oxygen for you body?).

I suspect you're gonna have a tough time limiting your air (hence
oxygen) intake this way; there's a pretty strong involuntary component
to breathing, and I think your body's gonna make you take in all the
air it wants, to match your effort, regardless of your best
intentions.

But perhaps even more to the point: while there seems to be some
divergent views on altitude training, the one which seems most
reasonable to me and most widely held by those who know this stuff is
that "live high, train low" is the ideal. In other words, get your
full complement of oxygen in training so that you can train at high
effort; but spend the rest of the day at altitude where your body will
react to the reduced oxygen by making more efficient use of it - by
boosting red blood cell production or whatever the physical
mechanism. If what you proposed even worked, it'd be more like "live
low, train high" and the worst of both worlds according to this view.

Bucky said:

You know how some Olympic athletes train in high altitudes, so that
their body get acclimated to the thinner air and performs at a higher
level when returning to sea level? Could you simulate the same thing
by not breathing as deeply while running (and therefore providing less
than maximum oxygen for you body?). (Sorry if this is a stupid
question.)

Back in the 60 and 70 there were a lot of studies on the affects of
altitude training in middle distance athletes. I only know this
because I wrote a paper on that subject for my technical writing class
in college. Bottom line what was discovered was to live at altitude
and training at race altitude. Most studies actually were very
inconclusive as to the benefits of altitude training. Although, one
could study what the African runners do and contradict those studies.

John