Category

VO2 Max

You have likely heard me talk about the importance of knowing and tracking your VO2 max. As Alex Hutchinson and I discussed in episode #151, your VO2 max refers to the maximum rate at which your muscles can extract oxygen from your blood and put it to metabolic use to generate energy. Your VO2 max is often used as an indicator of overall cardiorespiratory fitness and can serve as a metric for tracking progress.

As I discussed in detail during AMA #27 and again on Twitter in early March 2022, when looking at VO2 max in relation to all-cause mortality, we see a very clear trend. Simply bringing your VO2 max from ‘low’ (bottom 25th percentile) to ‘below average’ (25th to 50th percentile) is associated with a 50% reduction in all-cause mortality. When you go from ‘low’ to ‘above average’ (50th to 75th percentile) the risk reduction is closer to 70%!

The following is a collection of content diving deeper into the topic of VO2 max, including: what it is, how it is measured, and how to improve your VO2 max with Zone 5 training.

#201 – Deep dive back into Zone 2 | Iñigo San-Millán, Ph.D. (Pt. 2)

You can accomplish very important mitochondrial adaptations and very important metabolic adaptations by exercising one hour.” —Iñigo San-Millán

#176 – AMA #27: The importance of muscle mass, strength, and cardiorespiratory fitness for longevity

“If you have the aspiration of kicking ass when you’re 85, you can’t afford to be average when you’re 50.” —Peter Attia

#151 – Alex Hutchinson, Ph.D.: Translating the science of endurance and extreme human performance

“Any meaningful form of exercise that’s going to do substantial amounts of good is going to involve dealing with discomfort in one form or another.” —Alex Hutchinson

#69 – Ronesh Sinha, M.D.: Insights into the manifestation of metabolic disease in a patient population predisposed to metabolic syndrome, and what it teaches us more broadly

“The way we raise our kids early on might actually set a pattern for how much of an accelerated life, or how much of a stressed out nervous system they might have later on. . . a lot of the behavioral patterns that we’re instilling in our kids are kind of setting the foundation for insulin resistance and inflammation early on.” —Ronesh Sinha

#66 – Vamsi Mootha, M.D.: Aging, type 2 diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease – do all roads lead to mitochondria?

“We have 300 different forms of monogenic mitochondrial diseases. . .and these are terrible diseases and we need therapies for them. . .but it’s also our hope that studying some of them will provide insights into the common form of aging as well.” —Vamsi Mootha

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