giving blood-affecting performance?

Yes it does - I've donated on a Thursday and ran a 10k on the Sunday and my times were down.

Sometimes I've trained successfully after giving and sometimes i really do notice it.

Either way - its a good thing to do - so go for it.

Yep, it will certainly affect you. My mate the personal trainer gave blood and suffered with light headedness and feeling generally feeble for a while afterwards.

The blood volume will be replaced within 48 hours or so, but that is with plasma, as Alex has mentioned, getting the red blood cells back to normal takes quite a few weeks.

I did see an article, about how long things took, but about 5/6 weeks is right. Remember you have to leave at least 16 weeks, between donations so that gives you some idea of how long it takes the body to fully get over giving blood.

I won't be giving blood under after October.

I looked into blood a long time ago, just in case I was in a serious accident or whatever...

If you want to regenerate your red blood cells quicker, you need to eat iron-rich foods.

Red meat is the best, especially Liver (Liver is where animals store iron).

The next best things are pumpkin seeds, lentils, seaweed, spinach and potatoes but the iron in these is harder for the body to absorb because it must be seperated from phytate, calcium and zinc. In red meat, the iron is not chemically bonded to anything else.

Your body can only absorb so much iron at once, any excess will simply come out the other end, but Vitamin C can increase the potential for absorption, so make sure you get enough of that. The main proteins involved with production are Ferritin and Transferrin. If you eat a lot of iron suddenly, you may need to increase the ammount of those too, to make production more efficient.

You can get a protein called Erythropoietin (EPO) which dramatically increases red blood cell production (used for anemia patients), but it's technically "doping" if you're competing in cycling events.

So increase your iron intake and you will recover quicker. If you go crazy with it, you could probably shave a week off your recovery time.

...but my doctor told me that it's not as simple as that because there are so many other factors affecting red blood cell production, such as the condition of your kidneys (do you drink?), ammount of sleep you get, how much excersise you're doing and weather or not you use other medication (like cancer drugs, which can slow production down by killing red blood cells you've just created).

Again, unless you are making money from your racing I shouldn't worry too much matey.

zammmmo wrote:

I don't think you'd catch many people, irrespective of the level to which they race at, doing anything that will compromise their performance.

I think you'd find almost everyone does plenty of things that will compromise their performance. Anyone who trains less than, say, 20 hours per week is doing it, as is anyone who doesn't monitor every calorie they eat, and anyone who hasn't spent several thousand pounds on their bike.

They do this because, while cycling is important to them, their priorities lie with family, work, etc. If one of your priorities is giving blood then the performance drop is easy to justify. If it isn't, don't do it (at least during the season).

I wouldnt donate if I was doing a race I wanted to do well in the next weekend, but other than that - I dont mind donating. Some things are more important.