Dr. Andy Galpin

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.

And within that, several hundred people actually died.

And so it's a bit morbid, I understand, but it makes the science incredibly compelling because we can look at a number of people, wait for several of them to die, and then come back and say, what actually was different between those people who died at baseline versus those who didn't die, you know, again, at baseline and after that.

And so we can get really strong insights about

what predicted death.

Now, what they found in this initial study, and this is directly from the paper itself, was after age adjustment, so again, they would kind of factor in their age and say, let's take that out of the equation.

So after age adjusted, all-cause mortality, meaning died for any reason, declined directly across fitness levels.

So as you reduce your fitness, you increased your all-cause mortality risk.

And it went from a number of what is referred to as 64, so 64 deaths per 10,000 people.

That was the highest rate there.

It reduced from that to about 18.6.

And so again, if you're looking at that saying, all right, if I go from the least fit category to the most fit, my risk goes from 64 deaths per 10,000 people down to 18 deaths per 10,000 people.

If that part is confusing, just run the 18 versus the 64.

So another way to think about that is if my risk of dying is 18 and now it all of a sudden goes up to 64, it's a huge increase in your risk of dying and nobody wants that.