VO2 Max

In addition to building muscle, it’s also important to increase your body’s ability to take in oxygen and put it to work. That’s called VO2 max, and it’s one of the top indicators of how long you will live. While professional athletes measure this very accurately, we can do it simply — with a stopwatch.

I’m not asking you to become a pro athlete or to race on weekends, even though I’d encourage that if you can do it. I’m asking you to find your favorite endurance sport and do it twice a week. Could be running, swimming, rowing, cycling, a cardio machine at the gym, even running up stairs. It should not be tennis, badminton, pickleball, or another sport where you can pause and rest.

At least once every two weeks, you should time yourself and see how far or long or fast you can go in 4-5 minutes. This is called zone-3 training. You should be working too hard to talk, you should be hanging on long enough to make the distance, but at the end of it, you should have nothing left. In running, that could be the quarter mile or half mile. In swimming, it may be 200 meters. On a rowing machine at full resistance, it could be 1,000 meters. It’s hard. It’s tiring. You’re out of breath. You’re counting the seconds until it’s over. And you’re pushing yourself as hard as you can to the line. It should be defined by distance, not time. Try to pick a standard distance, not a standard time.

You should do this sprint at least three, preferably four times in a session, with a good break and drink in between. This session should take about an hour, and you should try to do it every 7-14 days. The goal is to push yourself. If you do that, your times will come down naturally. Keep track on a chart. You’ll see that your times don’t change for a month or two, then they go down a lot.

That’s it. Now, you may not be superman. You may run a quarter mile in 4 minutes. That’s okay. Work on getting it down to 3:50. That’s all I’m asking. At some point, your performance will go below the median, which means more people are slower than you than faster. If you’re in the top 50 percent in your sport for your age group, you’re off to a great start. From there, you can work on incremental gains, to get to the top 40 percent or so. If you can do that and stay there, continuing to perform at that level every ten days or so, you’re far better off than you were before, and you’re far better off than most people your age.

Congratulations. You’ve increased your VO2 max.

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