Brady Holmer

Because, you know, having a high VO2 max is kind of standard among high level endurance athletes.

But essentially what it is, is your body's ability to take in oxygen, take in air from the environment, distribute it to the rest of the body through your cardiovascular system.

get that oxygen into mitochondria and skeletal muscle, and then utilize that oxygen for energy in the form of ATP.

So it sort of represents your body's integrative ability to take in, distribute, and utilize oxygen.

And again, I think we'll talk about this later, but I think that's why it's such a potent predictor of longevity.

It's because

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.