Discussion: Donating blood

Couldn't find anything searching the archive, so here goes.

Who does it, and how does it affect your training? I've always felt flat as a tack for 1-2 weeks after donating, even given my relatively unfit state - can't breathe properly, zero strength. Does it affect your fitness? Do you back off to give your body time to regenerate some red stuff, or just push yourself more and call it harder training?

I think the effects are much less for plasma donations, but I've always been a sucker for the red bag.

(for any US people - our standard donation amount for whole blood is 470ml, which google tells me is ~15.9fl.oz.)

I do donate and i do notice a difference. An averag person has around 8 pints of blood and the standard size of a donation is close to a pint., an eigth of your blood is an eigth of your red blood cells.
I have never however felt the effects for as long as a week.
I dont do exersise for about 2 days after donatting and then the rest of that week i just take it easy, although i dont feel much different

In theory the training one does after donating blood should be your most beneficial. During that period the body is working with less than the normal red blood cells so it will be working with more effort. When the red blood cells build back up to normal levels there will then be more red cells available to carry out that effort.
It seems like legal blood doping, n'est-ce pas?

I definitely feel the effects of donating; and like everything else, as I've aged it takes longer to recover - it's more like 3 weeks for me now to get back to normal.

I donate 3-4 times a year as O- is quite sought after. I haven't noticed any change in recovery with age, but maybe I will start to as I'm moving into my late 40's.

I have raced as shortly as 3 days after giving, but I usually like to give myself 2-3 weeks. I don't notice any affects after the first day or so, but it's got to take longer than that to get the red blood cell count back to where it should be.

And for non-US people, our standard donation is 1 Pint (16fl oz).

When I donate, I feel completely sapped for a few days. I try to coordinate it with a recovery week in my training, so that I would be doing little training during the recovery period. Doing hardcore training right after donating could be dangerous if you have heart disease--with less oxygen carying capacity, your muscles (including heart) aren't going to get enough oxygen. Bad news if you're at risk for a heart attack already.

I donate regularly - every 3 months - and I can't say that it has ever affected my training. It's probably less noticeable the fitter you are?

This is off topic but I'd just like to make a pitch to the orienteering community to not forget to sign up for the bone marrow registry as well. The registry is always interested in having fit people donate. I had a 700 ml bone marrow harvest as I was a rare (and oh so lucky) perfect match for my daughter's bone marrow transplant 7 years ago. After a harvest don't expect to be training for a week to 10 days though. I'm happy to say my daughter Emma has a great sense of navigation and direction (and is good runner too). I guess its in the blood - though I was never a good runner. :)

i donate every 13 weeks as per Australian rules. I find that i havent had a serious cold or illness since i started 5 years ago. This may be due to replenishing red blood cells and keeping them healthy. Not sure but i like to think it is helping me and whoever gets my blood.

Based on our completely inadequate sample size, it looks like it correlates roughly with age and fitness as you'd probably expect.

Thanks for the comments guys - I'm in the throes of a determination to get fit again, and I've been putting off donating for a couple of months. I'm another O-, so the RCBS get twitchy if I don't donate.

Looks like a good excuse for a quiet week... :)

It seems to me that donating red blood cells must hurt one's aerobic capacity and therefore one's training and competition. I used to donate just whole blood once per year, during my training break. Lately I've been donating platelets about once per month. Platelet levels return to normal much faster than red cell levels (a few days versus a few weeks*), so I suspect it fits better with training for peak performance. Once I retire from trying to compete at a high level, I'll probably go back to donating whole blood more often, if the blood center would like me to; they might prefer platelets to my pedestrian A+ (if I remember correctly) blood.

* According to fact #45 on this page, "after donating blood, you replace the fluid in hours and the red blood cells within four weeks. It takes eight weeks to restore the iron lost after donating."

Some websites report a shorter time until red cell or hemoglobin levels return to normal.

Submaximal performance is not affected by blood donation, however maximal performance is significantly reduced for at least one week, according to this article: Panebianco RA, Stachenfeld N, Coplan NL, et al: Effects of blood donation on exercise performance in competitive cyclists. Am Heart J 1995;130(4):838-840

Here are some articles on the subject:
http://www.cptips.com/blood.htm (scroll down)
http://www.triathletemag.com/Departments/Training/... -- refers to a supercompensation hypothesis
http://velonews.com/article/5265
http://www.physsportsmed.com/issues/2001/06_01/new...
http://www.runnersweb.com/running/news/rw_news_200... (a bunch of articles copied from other sources)

Thanks eric for the useful links. I'll offer my experience. I donate whole blood about once a year during the off season as well. When I attempted (a few years back) to do any quality workouts too soon after donating, I felt as if my rating of perceived exertion was higher while the speed was the same. It was like walking in a room with a 6 foot ceiling instead of an 8-foot ceiling -- I had an artificially lowered high end of my effort.

A hypothesis occurred to me within the last couple of years that my typically vegetarian-skewed diet did not help me build back the iron very quickly. I do eat some meat, so I don't have to jettison my diet to accommodate blood donation. What's been successful the last 2-3 donations is to go from one meat meal per 10-14 days to 2 per week for a couple of weeks.

Your mileage may vary.

I donate semi regularly. Not much effect on my training because I fit the donations into my schedule and I am probably one of those submaximal performers these days. I don't give in the week before any competition I care about and try and schedule when my training is light anyway, such as in the week after a long race or just before going away for a weekend of dancing. As I have gotten older the problem has not been recovery from donating but getting a cold just before I planned to give and not giving at all. I usually take a few iron pills in the week before I plan to donate and a few more in the week after. I feel more tired for a few days but that is all.

I've always felt fine after donating blood, though they do advise you not to do any exercise for 2 days. I was running 3 days after, though it was not anything like intense training. I may have noticed a difference if I had timed myself - I'll let you know if it makes a difference.

>>.And for non-US people, our standard donation is 1 Pint (16fl oz).

Why would non-US people know what a Pint or fluid ounces are? The rest of the world is metric.

Juffy, donate plasma- then you get the red cells back and all you need to replace is the fluid. Which you can do in their tea room straight afterwards. I have done that before with no effects on training.

Jen - I donated this morning, and they are furiously trying to convert red blood donors to platelet/plasma people. Figured I might as well give the platelet thing a shot, so I'm booked in for early Feb. Seems like a good idea because:

a) if they're pushing it that hard, they obviously don't need my O- cells that much, and
b) as you say, it has no effect on training.

Seems like a winner. They had fruit mince pies in the tea room today. Mmm.

J$ - I said in my first post that our donations are 470mL/15.9fl.oz. Eric was just confirming that the US system is the same.

Why would non-US people know what a Pint or fluid ounces are?

For the same reason a US resident should know what a meter or kilogram is. For that matter, a cubit or stadia. The fact that you don't personally use something doesn't make knowledge of it irrelevant. However, if you really are ignorant of the system of measure used for roughtly 25% of the world's commerce, there are several sites that can enlighten you.

Oh, and I suppose I should add ;) but, really, why does the rest of the world resent our use of the English system so? (No, please don't answer that - we really don't care). It's not like we think that the Germans should stop speaking German just because most of the world speaks English.

is this a US v Canada thing?

You would think a Canadian would know what you were talking about re Pints and fluid ounces.

Well, being that I'm both, I suppose I should be conflicted, but I'm not. More like baffled. It just doesn't seem like that big a deal to use one system or the other (or both, which is really what we do here in the US). But, I really don't mean to hijack this thread.

Give blood! Give plasma! We're talking life and death, here. You can work your training around it.

I have no problem running my slow pace after donating even if I run the very same day. Going faster is another story and that I feel for about 4-7 days. I have not donated for one year since my RBC number is too low and I am too light to donate plasma.

How much do you have to weigh for Plasma? I know its 50kg or 8 stone for giving blood (yes, there is a slight difference between these but it depends which booklet you look at).

Why would non-US people know what a Pint [is]?

Nobody has ever ordered a pint of beer in a country outside the US?

But don't forget that US Pints are different from Imperial Pints:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pint

MuddyFox, I think it's 45kg for plasma/platelets if I recall from the pamphlet I was reading yesterday. No fear of me being knocked back - I think I weighed 45kg when I was 12, and I'm pretty close to triple that now. :)

The problem with this whole pint/fluid ounce thing is that there are multiple versions of the things with the same name. If someone says, I just donated a "pint" of blood, it could be that they donated 568 mL or 473 mL.

The fact that there are different numbers of fluid ounces in a pint depending on where you are and the fact that fluid ounces are different depending on where you are just further complicates matters.

A related pet-peave is the use of miles-per-gallon for fuel efficiency in Canada. It makes sense in the US, because people actually buy Gallons of gasoline and measure distances in miles. But, in Canada, we don't. What's crazier, is that we calculate miles-per-gallon using an imperial gallon ... I'm convinced this is just a marketting ploy to advertise higher (i.e., better) mpg ratings!

Anyway, the sooner the world fully converts to metric the better IMO.

I tried giving platelets yesterday (for the fourth time), and the process had to be halted after a couple minutes due to a needle miscue. The technicians do their best, but I guess some veins roll more than others, have more valves, are narrower, or whatever else makes it tricky. Anyway, the draw pressure kept dropping really low, then on the return, a little bubble started forming when the blood being pumped back went outside the vein and pooled under the skin. That's when the technician pushed the button to stop the process. I'm surprised how small the bruise is, and it doesn't hurt any more than usual. I'll have to try again in the next week or two, but in the other arm.

My wife had to stop giving blood because of repeated problems at the needle site (even when donating whole blood). She talked to her doctor about it and he confrimed that she has what nurses call "rolly veins". His advice was to find other ways to make a positive difference in the world.

My veins, on the other hand, seem to have a been designed specifically for the task. They stick out from the skin with even the slightest pressure on the upper arm and I usually fill a whole blood bag (1 pint!) in just a couple minutes.

Unfortunately, it's been a couple of years since I gave blood, but I do recall looking for a volume indication on the bag. I'm not sure about this, but I remember that it said "1 unit".

They still do. Doctors always order blood in "units". This lack of precision is intentional to distinguish it from something that was accurately measured.

The place I donate at you have to weigh 59 kg or 130 pds to donate plasma and for whole blood the weight is 110 pds. When I tell them how much I weigh the nurse still weighs me anyways when I give whole blood.

Well I had one of the worse problems giving blood plasma, short of an actual infection: what most likely was a false PCR-test positive for Hep C. I'm banned now worldwide as a donor of anything. At least a half-dozen tests for HCV were all negative since. This was in the early days of HCV testing, I hear they got a bit more accurate later.

2 days after a double red donation I am ready to train.