Dr. Andy Galpin

Because it's like, hey, this is a maximal exercise test, and it was something we could do for athletics to see –

Who's the most fit?

Who had the best endurance?

And if you look at the research on sport performance, there are some clear associations.

In fact, some of them are very highly tied to success in sports and your VO2 max.

Now, classically, you would think of something maybe like an endurance runner, a marathon runner per se.

And while the VO2 max is not the only thing at all that predicts performance, clearly it is higher in those individuals relative to athletes in, say, baseball or golf or something like that.

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.