Brady Holmer

And I think Levine talked about how important it was not only for improving it, but also to try to maintain it throughout lifespan.

Yeah, I think the answer to that would be they sort of do and they don't.

I mean, I guess it would depend maybe what type of athletes we're talking about.

So I guess maybe we'll use endurance athletes, maybe like such as myself as an example.

Like you mentioned before, I have a generally high VO2 max.

And while that's what I like to think about it is, you know, having a high VO2 max if you want to be an endurance athlete is...

sort of a prerequisite to kind of get in the door.

You know, you won't find someone in the Olympics or, you know, even at a sub elite level who probably doesn't have a VO2 max of 65 or above.

So it's sort of this ticket to get into the gate of, oh, if you want to be an endurance athlete, you need to have a VO2 max of 65 or higher.

But once you get kind of to those higher levels of elite athletes who all have that VO2 max of above 65, it's,

it doesn't do a very good job of predicting who's going to win the race.

So if we line up at the start line and you say you don't have any idea of people's previous performance, but you just have their VO2 maxes, the person with the highest VO2 max isn't always going to win.

And that's because there are several other performance markers that are

associated with doing well in, say, a race, like how long you can run at a high percent of your VO2 max, your lactate threshold, your exercise economy.

These are all things that you can improve independent of your VO2 max that can help improve your performance.

So yes, while I want to do VO2 max workouts as an endurance athlete, and most endurance athletes will do VO2 max type workouts every now and then, but once a week in the form of high intensity intervals,

They can also do workouts that are targeting, you know, getting better at running economy or training their lactate threshold.

So you can get better without improving your VO2 max.

I think that's important, not just for athletes to know, but just people who are generally interested in health.

If you're training and you don't see, you know, your VO2 max on your watch isn't necessarily improving, well, you can still get faster.