Dr. Andy Galpin

Bill Bowerman, if you have a body, you're an athlete.

And so I just want your physiology to be functioning at the highest level that can and

You can then choose to use those skills however you'd like to be better at playing golf or basketball or pickleball or riding mountain bikes.

I don't really care whether you want to have more energy, more recovery, better sleep throughout the day.

Something like a VO2 max is going to be intricately involved in all of those things.

Now, for those of you that absolutely love numbers, I'll give you some, but please don't get too specific and particular about these couple of studies I'm going to go over.

Think of them just as really highlights of the overall field.

Depending on which population is studied in a certain setting or database, these numbers will vary slightly.

But again, this is going to represent what you would generally find across dozens, if not hundreds of similar studies that looked at VO2 max.

and overall health and wellness.

Quick point of clarification.

When we say fitness, scientifically, we're referring to VO2 max.

In the actual strength conditioning and performance settings, you might have a different definition of it.

That's absolutely fine.

But scientifically, those terms are pretty synonymous.

So fitness means we've tested your VO2 max in almost every scientific situation.

So let's start off with that first seminal Stephen Blair paper from 1989 in JAMA.

In that, they had about 10,000 men and about 3,000 women or so.

And what's actually interesting about this study and many others like it, they typically follow the individuals for years.

I believe in this actual study, it was something like nine years.