Team-sports performance requires complex technical and motor skills, tactical proficiency, and high developed specific physical capacities that encompass speed, agility, muscular strength, power, and endurance. Although outcomes in team sports hinge on technical and tactical actions, coaches and conditioning staffs are striving for innovative apporaches to improve players' physical performance. Therefore, several altitude/hypoxic methods, developed over time (see Chapter 4), could offer benefits to team-sport specific physical capacities and their underlying physiological mechanisms. Elevations as low as 600-1,200 m could already alter technical and tactical aspects (Mainly due to a lower air resistance that affects ball flight characteristics) and compromise team-sport performance with some identified physical impairments. These physically deleterious effects include lower total distance covered, and high-velocity running and acceleration frequency that hinder players' capacity to repeat intense efforts. This suggests that team-sport (pre-)acclimatization (Natural altitude) or acclimation (simulated environment) is a prerequisite like in endurance-based sports (see Chapter 15 and 16). However, the challenge in team sports it to find a sufficient long time-window to follow the recommendations for succesfull "live high-train high" (LHTH) and "live high-train low" (LHTL) methods. Because team-sport athletes possess an efficient combination of aerobic and anaerobic capacities, they can derive benefits from the latest altitude/hypoxic training advancements, particularly emerging from new "live low-train high" (LLTH) interventions and combinations of methods. This chapter will therefore proveide and overview of traditional and innovative altitude/hypoxic training methods, with their respectives pros and cons in reference to team-sports requirements and constraints.
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