Dr. Andy Galpin

You've extracted now 25% of the oxygen that came in your system.

You only got 25% of it out.

That's not a very good score.

You want that number because it's a multiplier to be as high as possible.

So if 100 goes in, I don't want 75 coming out.

I want zero coming out.

Let's say maybe you got 10 out.

So now 100 went in, 10 came out.

You extracted 90% of the oxygen that was available to you and got to bring it into muscle and use it for everything we talked about earlier.

And so now your AVO2 difference is 90, much higher than 25.

So we get to multiply that by our cardiac output, which brings our VO2 max back.

even higher.

The easiest way to think about VO2 max is to use what's called the Fick equation.

VO2 max, according to the Fick equation, is your heart rate, in other words, how many beats per minute, multiplied by your stroke volume, how much blood coming out per pump, multiplied by what's called your AVO2 difference.

To be perfectly honest with you, the AVO2 difference numbers are difficult to convey over audio only, so I'm going to spend most of our time on the other side of the equation.

When it comes time to interpreting your VO2 max numbers, there's a lot of charts and papers you can use.

We'll provide some of those in the show notes for you.

I want to give you some numbers, though, to give you a rough context.

Typically, we think about VO2 max in what's called a relative term.

Now,