Brady Holmer

It's not maybe just something like grip strength, but it really represents, you know, your body's physical function and your ability to produce ATP.

It's measured during maximal exercise, hence the term maximal oxygen consumption.

So one of the ways that it's typically measured, say, if you were in an exercise physiology study, you would get on a treadmill, you would run at progressively faster speeds until eventually you just couldn't go anymore.

So you would exercise until exhaustion, all the while having your gas exchange measured.

So you're going to be wearing a mask to measure your

oxygen intake.

And that's able to, you know, measure the rate of oxygen utilization by your body.

And at the point of maximal exertion, however much oxygen your body is utilizing, that's your maximal oxygen, your rate of oxygen consumption.

And it's not a fun test.

That's the main way to measure it.

And probably the gold standard way to measure it would be during an incremental exercise test to exhaustion.

But

But it can also be measured or estimated rather using things like the Cooper 12 minute test, which essentially involves you just running kind of as far as you can in 12 minutes.

And there are online calculators where you can put your time into there to get an estimate.

You can also get an estimate of your VO2 max by if you have a smartwatch or something like that, a fitness tracker that will also allow you to estimate it.

And I say estimate because, you know, without direct measures of gas exchange, you're not really able to definitively say what that is, but it uses various things like your age, sex, weight, and your physical fitness metrics to estimate that.

So those are kind of the three primary ways that people can measure it.

Dr. Levine kind of talked about some of the flaws with estimating it using those equations versus, you know, obviously getting it directly measured into a lab.

But

Yeah, it's a performance marker, obviously, but it's also a health marker.