Dr. Andy Galpin

So some sports it mattered a lot in, others it didn't, and there was a way that we could assess and test and identify performance, and it all made sense to me, and I grasped it.

But what I never did was make that connection across to basic physiology.

And I don't blame myself because no one else did either.

Now, what's funny about that is it really didn't come into my purview until really close to 2010 or so.

And I was fortunate enough as a graduate student to have a gentleman by the name of Jonathan Myers, a legendary physiologist out of the University, actually Stanford.

And he came and visited our laboratory and he gave a wonderful talk about the relationship between VO2 max and mortality.

And I was stunned.

And now you're talking about – and I'll give some actual studies later.

But you're talking about research and papers that used 10,000 subjects, 100,000 subjects, just massive databases.

And they were finding incredibly strong predictions of your VO2 max and how long you're going to live.

And my eyes just exploded.

And I went, that's it.

Oh, my gosh.

Being healthy, performing physically at your best –

is almost the same thing.

So now I got really excited about this metric and said, hey, man, I want to know what this stuff looks like.

Is Jonathan the only guy that found this out?

Well, learning more about the history of exercise physiology and going back, and I realized we actually had known this since the late 1980s.

So there's another legendary physiologist who unfortunately very recently passed away named Stephen Blair.

And he spent the vast majority of his career running these giant studies.