Brady Holmer

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.

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.