Dr. Andy Galpin

You're talking about the addition of age represented a 1.06.

Increase in risk factor, hypertension, smoking, arterial fibrillation, cancer, all these things are plotted and you can see how much they increased risk.

And all of those, the highest one was chronic kidney disease, which represented 1.49.

When you look into the VO2 max numbers, the lowest number

risk factor was 1.39 and then it just escalates from there to 1.66 to 2.1 to 2.9 again with the least fit people having a 4x higher risk of mortality that's how important your heart is and so it's hard for me to make a cogent argument that even as athletes who are interested in say again dunking a basketball or these anaerobic high power low fatigue sports

Very difficult to say your heart is not playing a big role in your global health and that that isn't going to limit your performance somehow.

So at this point, if I haven't convinced you of the importance of your VO2max, I don't think I can, so let's go ahead and move on regardless.

Now, you're probably interested to know how do I assess that, how do I value that, and then do something about it, and we're gonna cover that a little bit later.

I promise I'll give you a full breakdown of how to know whether your VO2max is good based on whether you're male or female, your age,

and where that puts you in the categories and percentiles.

We'll cover all those data and have, of course, plenty of links directly to tables in the show notes.

But I think before we do that, we actually need to talk more about what makes the cardiac tissue so special and unique.

I'm going to talk a lot about skeletal muscle in other episodes.

And so what I want to do here is really focus on what is unique and special about the muscle fibers in the heart, as this is going to explain a lot about

about how we interpret it, what we do about it, and how actually there's more things to pay attention to than just your VO2 max.

To get us started here, I'd like to actually ask you a question.

That is, you ever thought about why your heart never gets sore?

I mean, as I said at the beginning, you've got three types of muscle, right?

Smooth muscle, which doesn't have contractile properties and it's not important or relevant to force production or human movement.

You've got skeletal muscle, which is everything else.