London 2012 Olympics: Mo Farah to sleep in oxygen tent as he dreams of landing Games gold Dr Steve Ingham, the head of physiology at the English Institute of Sport, said the altitude training that Farah and some of the UK athletics team had been involved in required ongoing management to avoid a dip in performance around three weeks after coming down from altitude, which is a typical occurrence. Ingham said some sports, such as rowing, managed the dip by returning to sea level just over three weeks before their big competitions. However some endurance athletes, such as Farah, triathletes and long-distance runners, preferred to try to mimic the altitude effects right up to the day of competition so that their body did not adjust to sea level physiologically. "For Mo Farah it works best to be in an oxygen tent at Games time and right up to competition," Ingham said. Farah is expected to run the 10,000 metres final on Aug 4 with the 5,000m heats on Aug 8 and the final of that event following three days later. UK Athletics has bought 12 of the oxygen tents, also known as altitude generators, for use by its athletes. BOA spokesman Darryl Seibel said the association allowed a small number of athletes to stay outside the Olympic village for performance needs or specific logistical operations, but he refused to say which sports or athletes were involved for security reasons. The effectiveness of altitude training has been one of the key research projects undertaken by the English Institute of Sport and its sports science and sport medicine services to help 34 Olympic and Paralympic sports over the past four years. Ingham and his team have been researching altitude training to find a definitive way of measuring whether it works and how each athlete's training could be adjusted to make the best use of altitude training. They introduced a marker - a small amount of carbon monoxide - which attaches itself to the blood's haemoglobin which has enabled them to tailor the altitude training with remarkable efficiency. Ingham said athletes using altitude training were now getting up to 12 per cent improvement in haemoglobin levels, compared to up to six per cent before.