Dr. Andy Galpin

You have some room to move there and it will respond to your training.

And so there's some light at the end of the tunnel if you're looking at those numbers and you've had a VO2 max done recently and you're thinking, oh my gosh, I am way below what Andy said there.

That's fine.

You still have within your capabilities training.

to change that.

Now, while I said that those are technically elite and would probably put you in the 99th percentile, they aren't necessarily the highest we've ever seen.

In fact, it is very common to be much, much higher than the scores I just described.

So as always, I'd love to share with you what the best in the world are.

It's important for us to reset our standards and recognize and challenge what we think is possible and to not accept just being in the 99th percentile.

Let's see what is absolutely possible in human physiology.

And those numbers and scores go far higher than that 55 and 60 I just described.

So for many, many years in history, the highest documented VO2 max that we would acknowledge scientifically was from an Austrian cross-country skier.

Now, this study was actually published about four years prior to him then winning a gold medal in the Olympics.

And so he was obviously a very high profile and highly successful athlete.

He came in, if you know these values, if not, that's okay, with a hemoglobin concentration of around 16.8, which is outrageous.

Most folks are going to be 14 or 15 or something like that.

Hemoglobin is the molecule that carries oxygen around in your red blood cells.

So innately, he's got a huge ability to do that.

His VO2 max was reported to be 90.6 milliliters per kilogram per minute, which is incredible.

So that actually stood around for a very long time, and people thought that that's basically it.