Dr. Andy Galpin

The first one, most iconic one, came out in a journal called JAMA, so Journal of American Medical Association, one of the preeminent journals in all of science and physiology and medicine, in 1989.

And in that initial study, he was really the first one that said, hey, when we look at VO2 max and we compare that to, say, smoking or cardiovascular disease, it's as strong, if not a stronger predictor of how long you're going to live

than any of these other metrics.

And then actually, if you look, you'll see study after study, and you can pull up meta-analyses, and this has really caught, actually, attention, lexicon, in the last, say, five or so years.

People have really jumped on board, and it's really warmed my heart, actually.

for that to happen, because I felt like it was something that us in the exercise scientists world, a strength and conditioning folks, and again, scientists of exercise have been screaming from the top of our lungs for 20 years, and no one really paid attention to or cared about.

And then people found this stuff out and started talking about it as if it was a new finding.

And us, again, in our world, we're saying, Oh, my gosh, we've been telling you this for 20 plus years.

So that's okay.

It's a free pass.

I'll give you that.

I apologize to you.

I will accept your apology for ignoring us exercise scientists for so long.

But I think it really highlights another theme of this entire show, which is the importance of understanding what maximum performance looks like.

If you want to be a better athlete, that's great.

It's my personal interest, but that doesn't have to be yours.

But the value that creates to the rest of society is unmatched.

VO2 max is one of those examples.

I will share with you many, many more of those in other episodes.

But that is, to me, one of the best examples of when we stop looking at health and performance differently and start looking at it as, hey, if your physiology performs at the highest level possible, you're going to be healthy, right?