Dr. Andy Galpin

But you can also do the lower intensity stuff every day or combination.

So really you can modify this based on your lifestyle and what's going on.

And finally, rest intervals, they're not incredibly applicable here.

In fact, we've already baked them in.

If you're not doing intervals, then there is no rest interval.

If you are...

We typically look for something like a one-to-one work-to-rush ratio, but you're welcome to do two-to-one, one-to-two, or any combination of that.

If you train appropriately, and of course, you've got all the other factors like your nutrition and sleep and stress management under control, it's not unrealistic to expect a 30% to 50% improvement in VO2 max after six to 12 months.

You'll find plenty of studies that land in that ballpark.

The rate of increase obviously goes down as you become more and more trained.

Now, candidly, you don't have the ability to improve your VO2max probably as much as you do something like your strength, but you can improve it significantly nonetheless.

You will find plenty of studies showing even a 10% to 20% increase in highly trained individuals after a year.

In untrained folks, that probably takes about half that time.

So 10 to 20% improvement in four to six months or so.

So if you know where you're at right now, you train appropriately, fairly consistently.

Again, those are reasonable numbers to expect after a half a year or so of training.

And as we understand it, the biggest limiting factor at this point is probably the time needed to fill the ventricles back up with blood.

I know we covered a lot of ground in this episode and I hope you had as much fun listening to it as I did talking about it.

But before we walk out of here, let's quickly recap what we discussed.

Most importantly, we talked about why you actually breathe, how you can pull a heart out of a living animal and it can continue to beat on its own, and why your heart, unlike the rest of your muscles, never gets sore.