Brady Holmer

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.

You can still get stronger, improve your exercise performance while not improving your VO2 max.

So it's for that reason, I think that athletes sometimes don't

Just think about explicitly training their VO2 max.

Many elite athletes might not even know what their VO2 max is because they don't care.

They just really care about how fast they're running.

But then, of course, athletes should be concerned about increasing their VO2 max, not only for the health reasons that you just mentioned, you know, it's associated with longevity, which is great.

You want to avoid that decline with age and maintain it as long as possible.

But again, you know, you can see significant improvements when you do improve your VO2 max, which can be thought of as your ceiling.

You know, if you move your ceiling up, everything below that is going to improve.

So short answer to that would be, yeah, athletes look to improve their VO2 max.

Among the highest people, the highest VO2 maxes, it might not be as much of a concern, but people are all still interested.

You know, athletes and non-athletes alike are interested in improving their VO2 max.

I'm like, yeah.

You can certainly do that by using high intensity interval training.