This January marked a big personal milestone for me. I was finally able to donate blood after 25+ years. Let’s take a look at my training response before and after blood donation to see how it impacted my training.
I hadn’t been able to donate blood since 1998, due to living in Scotland for 6+ months in the 1990s throughout my post-doc, during the height of the Mad Cow outbreak. However, this past December the Canadian Blood Services had enough long-term evidence to remove this restriction, so I happily jumped at the chance.
Our Scott Steele gave a nice overview about the basic science of how blood donation can impact aerobic performance. I won’t repeat this information, but I thought I would flesh it out more with some personal data of how I responded to my late-January donation as an individual case study.
While I intend to donate blood fairly regularly throughout the year, this January date worked very well for consistent data, as I’m deep into indoor trainer season thanks to our winter. This meant that my training was both pretty regular and also very controlled due to being indoors, such that I could compare across similar or identical workouts.
So let’s take a look at my heart rate responses to an easy endurance ride and also a threshold interval workout. We’ll also see whether there were differences in my actually performing these workouts and whether there were perceptual differences.
Easy Endurance
I took it easy the evening and day after donation, with the only workout a bouldering session late the day after. FWIW, I was climbing as expected, even projecting and sending a challenging route. This was to be expected as climbing is more of a pure muscular power rather than an aerobic effort.
The first cycling workout is your stock standard endurance ride. The morning before donation, I did the 45 min version of Xert’s “Back to Blue” ride, all of it well under my threshold and what we might consider “Zone 2” intensity.
You’ll see that I had done a couple of interval workouts in the preceding days, so my training readiness was yellow (yellow stars). So if anything, my heart rate response would be biased towards being higher than normal.
But there was nothing out of the ordinary here. I felt fine and my HR averaged 108 bpm, completely within expectations.
HR was a LOT higher with this basic endurance effort 2 days post-donation, averaging 120 bpm versus 108 bpm. This is classic cardiovascular physiology. Plasma volume rebounds quite rapidly, within 24-36 h of donation. But because of less total hemoglobin mass (takes ~4 weeks to totally regenerate red blood cells to baseline levels), the cardiac output (total amount of blood pumped by the heart in one minute) in order to deliver the same amount of red blood cells to the muscles must increase, hence the higher heart rate.
End message – endurance rides are quite doable post-donation. While heart rate is a bit higher, it’s nowhere near your ceiling and not a major physiological strain or obstacle.
Kicking it Up a Notch
So what happens when we ramp up the intensity immediately post-donation?
Another favourite indoor workout of mine is what I call “Compressed Towers,” involving 6×5 min sweet spot efforts with a 30 s hard start and finish (at current fitness, the start/main/finish wattages are 290/215/301 W. One challenge is the building fatigue over the workout, with only 1 min easy recovery in between sets. It’s a hard workout in terms of strain buildup and difficulty but one which I can always do fairly comfortably, though during the sixth set I’m usually eagerly awaiting the end.
This is data from Jan 15, 9 days pre-donation. Looking at the third effort as an example, the overall average watts was 232 W, with the opening 30 s at about 290 W and the final 30 s at about 305 W. Heart rate was averaging 138 bpm and cadence at 93 rpm.
Four days post-donation, I was well-rested physically and did the same workout again. Below you can see that I flamed out after the 3rd set, which pretty much never happens with me.
The first set was already tough, feeling like how the 5th or 6th set typically feels in terms of perceptual effort. I was already struggling to keep a high cadence.
Looking at the third set again for a direct comparison with pre-donation, I averaged a slightly lower 229W overall but the HR was higher at 141 bpm and the cadence dropped down to 85 rpm.
Practical Recommendations
So what might we take away from my personal case study when it comes to adapting training to blood donation?
- Hydration in the 24-48 h following donation is critical to maximize plasma volume rebound.
- Focus on iron-rich foods to aid in red blood cell production capacity.
- Endurance efforts can resume as normal within 24 – 48 h post-donation. Your HR will be higher, but as long as you maintain the lower intensity, it should not impact duration of training.
- Strength training – in my case through bouldering – is minimally affected by donation, though you might want to err on the side of longer recovery bouts between reps or sets.
- Harder threshold type efforts definitely take a hit, and will probably take about 2 weeks before they’re back to pre-donation in terms of intensity/frequency/duration of effort. I would suggest reducing the intensity/wattage and maintaining frequency and duration over these two weeks.
Have fun and ride fast!
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