Indoor Training – Air quality

I have known the importance of evaporative cooling for quite some time. Due to this I have always instructed my athletes to go out and get a big fan before the stores put them away in late summer. Recently, I found out that there is much more to the story of improving environmental conditions for indoor training than I realized and that if you really want to optimize your indoor training there are other things you must address. 

A few months back I called my friend Joel Solly of Indoor Air Professionals. You see, my wife had pleaded with me for years to have the ducts cleaned in the house. While attending a Bike team meeting which Jolly was hosting at his office, both my wife and I immediately realized the quality of the air was pristine in Joel’s place. Before leaving I asked Joel to send over a salesperson to speak with me about his indoor air quality services. 

A week later in walks Gwen. She looked at the house and gave me a quote to get the ducts cleaned. We had been living in the house a few years and never had them cleaned. At the end of her presentation I asked why the air quality in their office at Indoor Air Professionals was so good. She explained that not only would duct cleaning help but a purification system would decrease pollutants and particulates in the air of our home. She also mentioned that Joel would be very interested in using me and my training center as an example of what an air quality assessment could reveal and that is why I am writing this article today. The findings were surprising if not alarming to me. 

Joel stopped by a few days later with a indoor air quality box. I guess you can think of it as the Black Box for air quality. It samples just about everything you can imagine from the air and stores the data in its memory for later retrieval and examination. This box was measuring oxygen, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, humidity, temperature, total volatile organic compounds (TVOC) and a host of other things. After calibrating this Box with outdoor air samples we set it up in my office and training center. I was instructed to just do what I do here. Work, train and do an occasional load of laundry. My washer dryer are both in an enclosed space within my office. While all this was going on the box was recording any changes in the air of this room. 

As I rode I started to see the numbers change. Remember, I have a 20 inch high volume fan on me helping to cool me and it is evaporation that is cooling me, ultimately. This means that the movement of air is essential and humidity levels also play a role ultimately. I have a dehumidifier in the room to keep humidity low and it is air conditioned. Within minutes I could see the humidity rising. 60%, then 65% and ultimately by the end of the hour it was at 75%. We are talking about a room with 8 foot ceilings, and is 12 feet wide and 15 feet long. In one hour my sweat evaporating and the water vapor in my breath increased 1440 cubic feet of air 20%! Temperature also rose 4 degrees Fahrenheit but the alarming part was the CO2. CO2 is offset during exercise. The harder you go the more of what you are exhaling is CO2. If levels get too high you begin to feel sleepy like in church or in an office space with many people in a closed space. Levels were at 600 parts when I started which is a little high but I had already been sitting in the office and working at my desk since 8am. It was almost 2pm when I started exercising. After the workout, I spoke with Joel and told him of the readings and he told me levels over 1000 are high and over 1200 start to get a little on the dangerous side if you are over exposed to that level. Well in this one hour of steady state riding I raised the CO2 levels to a little over 1500 parts. I more than doubled the CO2 in my workout space. One other thing jumped out when we looked at the reports. I could see that something called TVOC’s spiked very high then dropped shortly after they rose. Joel explained that TVOC’s were Total Volatile Organic Compounds. Which are compounds that vaporize at room temperature and that common sources are housecleaning and maintenance products, like detergents. High exposure to these TVOC’s can cause many disorders and illnesses. So, why did these TVOC levels spike while I was workout out? Joel asked a few questions and he figured it was when I did laundry and when did I do Laundry? I did laundry while I rode. I thought it was a great way to multi-task. So, here I was exposing myself to high CO2 and high levels of TVOC and breathing as deep as possible. Not so good huh? 

Well, Joel sat down with me and I learned a few more things about indoor training environments. Here are some recommendations to optimize your air quality for both performance and your health. On top of the big ass fan I have always recommended, crack a window in the room and if you have a ventilation fan in the house turn it on. This will pull fresh air into the room and help to keep CO2 from going to high. Use a dehumidifier. Keeping humidity low will insure there is room in the air for water to evaporate into. 100% humidity means there is no room for water in the air. It is full. So, in high humidity situation sweat will drip rather than evaporate. Lower humidity means more room for evaporation. Clear your area of all paints, gas cans, detergents and the like. You are planning on processing dozens of liters of air per minute. For example at moderate intensity I process about 80 l/min. 1440 cubic feet converts to 4077 cubic liters. So, I can process the entire volume of air in my room in just 50 minutes and that is a moderate intensity. If I were to add a few intervals and I can drop that time down to 30 minutes. Now consider this, my wife and I, during the winter months will often train in this room together! 

For those of you that think, “Oh I like to sweat and be hot”, know this, these types of adverse environmental conditions do not create the type of stress that creates a positive training adaptation. They just ruin workouts and possibly damage your health. I now use a purification system in the room. It drops the parts of pollutants to crazy low levels. You can actually smell how clean the air is when you enter the room. I crack the windows and turn on the bathroom exhaust. The dehumidifier is on, the fan is on and now all I have to do is get on the darn trainer. Clean up your training environment and benefit.

Peter Cummings specializes with training with Power meters and the use of the TrainingPeaks platform and WKO+. He was certified by the American College of Sports Medicine in 1993. He is a Certified and Licensed USA Cycling Level II (Expert) Coach with Distinction, and Certified USA Cycling Skills Instructor. He serves as the Director of Medical Fitness and Cardiac Rehabilitation at a facility in Williamsville. As a health club owner and coach he has directed and overseen the programming of over 10,000 individual and has been racing bicycles since 1991. His many athletes stand on podiums at Nationals, State and Local championships and have worn the Stars and Stripes National Championship Jersey. He is available for consultations, presentations, testing, programming or coaching. Those interested can contact him at Peter@Plan2Peak.com.  For more articles on training and racing with power and other cycling specific topics by Coach Cummings visit www.Plan2Peak.com.