Peter Attia

And you won't, for example, see that when it comes to zone two.

So we're going to talk a lot about that today, but I just want to point out zone two is a much more difficult area to navigate because it's not a maximal effort.

It's an in-between effort.

VO2 max is a maximal effort.

So when you tell somebody to basically floor it until they're going to keel over, that's actually much easier to achieve.

Now, to put some context around the importance of VO2 max in mortality, again, because it's been studied, if you're in the bottom tier,

quartile or quintile, so bottom 20 to 25% of the population with respect to your VO2 max, you've got a four to five fold higher risk of mortality, all cause mortality in any given year than those in the top 3%, two to 3%.

That's a pretty big jump.

But keep in mind, even tiny little jumps, say moving from the second quartile to the third quartile, will still have easily a 50% to 75% improvement in all-cause mortality.

So why is this such a powerful relationship?

And I think it comes down to not just what the number represents, which is everything I've talked about vis-a-vis oxygen delivery and utilization.

I've said this before, but I think it bears repeating.

Measures like VO2 max, just like strength, they're actually integrators of work done.

So if a person has a VO2 max that is low,

and their aspiration is to have a very high VO2 max, they can, but it will take potentially years and countless hours of work done.

And that work will be done at the level of their cardiovascular system, their pulmonary system, their hematologic system, muscular system, metabolic system.

And all of those things will have to work and work and work for hundreds of hours to get a desired outcome.

And if you think about that, that's much more, frankly, impressive from a physiologic perspective than taking a pill that lowers your cholesterol.

It's not to say that taking a pill that lowers your cholesterol doesn't improve outcomes, but it's not going to come close to improving outcomes as much as this does on average.

There are edge cases.