Speaker A
So, I very often say that the best thing that you can do for your long-term health is to keep your body moving. But if you forced me to boil all of that down into one single number, then one of
Learn how to boost your VO2 max with effective exercise to improve longevity and overall health, explained by Doctor Alex with scientific evidence.
Key Takeaways
- VO2 max is a critical indicator of cardiovascular and overall health linked to longevity.
- High-intensity interval training is the most effective way to improve VO2 max.
- Regular monitoring with smart devices can optimize training and safety.
- Balance HIIT with steady aerobic exercise to avoid injury and maintain consistency.
- Building a strong aerobic base early helps preserve function and quality of life in later years.
Summary
- VO2 max is the maximum volume of oxygen your body can use during intense exercise, reflecting the combined health of your heart, lungs, circulation, and cellular mitochondria.
- A higher VO2 max predicts longer and healthier life expectancy, with fitness levels rivaling or surpassing risks like smoking and diabetes.
- VO2 max naturally declines about 10% per decade after your 30s without intervention, impacting daily physical capabilities.
- High-intensity interval training (HIIT) is more effective at improving VO2 max than steady moderate exercise.
- Two proven HIIT protocols are 1515 (15 seconds hard, 15 seconds easy repeated 40-60 times) and 4x4 (4 minutes hard, 3 minutes recovery repeated 4 times).
- HIIT works by pushing the heart to adapt and increasing mitochondria in muscle cells, boosting oxygen use and energy production.
- Smartwatches like Garmin or Apple Watch can help monitor heart rate zones and estimate max heart rate for safer, more effective training.
- Overdoing HIIT can lead to injury, especially in older adults, so balancing exercise types and building a steady aerobic base is important.
- Maintaining a larger 'engine' or reserve capacity helps sustain physical function and recover from setbacks as you age.
- The goal is to enter older age as fit and strong as possible to minimize the impact of inevitable physical declines.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to VO2 Max and Its Importance
- 00:57What is VO2 Max?
- 01:58Biology Behind VO2 Max and Energy Production
- 03:04Impact of VO2 Max on Daily Life and Longevity
- 03:54Research Evidence Linking VO2 Max to Mortality Risk
- 05:03Age-Related Decline in VO2 Max and Its Effects
- 06:04How to Increase VO2 Max with Exercise
- 07:02Why High-Intensity Interval Training Works
- 08:12Effective HIIT Protocols for VO2 Max Improvement
- 09:13Using Smartwatches to Monitor Heart Rate and Training Zones
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
the very best numbers that we have for predicting how long and how well you live is going to be your VO2 max. And the brilliant thing about this is that you can now track it fairly consistently with a decent smartwatch like the one
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I've got here. This is my Garmin. So, in this video, I want to explain what VO2 max actually is in the simplest possible way. If I can, I want to explain why it matters so much for a long and healthy
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life and exactly how the evidence says that you can improve it. And as always, if you want to take a look at the research, then I'll put lots of different links in the description below. So, let me start with the name
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because it sounds far more complicated than it actually is. So, VO2 max is what we call it. The V stands for volume, the O2 is oxygen, and the max is just maximum. So what it really means is the
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maximum volume of oxygen that your body can take in and actually use in a single minute when you are working as hard as you possibly can. Think of it like, you know, a bit like horsepower in your car's engine. A bigger number means a
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bigger, more powerful engine. That's all it basically is. But here's why that number is so powerful, and it comes down to your biology. So to use a lot of oxygen, a whole chain of systems in your body has to work very beautifully, all
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of them together in sync with each other. So your lungs pull oxygen out of the air that you breathe. Your heart pumps that oxygen-rich blood around the body. Your blood vessels carry that blood to where it's needed. Your muscles
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receive it. And then deep inside your muscle cells, there are these tiny little engines called mitochondria. And their job is to take that oxygen, combine it with the food that you just eaten, and then burn it to make energy.
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And this, by the way, is exactly why the food you eat matters so much. Because if all you put into your body is artificial processed food from a factory, the engine is never going to run as cleanly or as powerfully as it would on food
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that is natural and whole. Now VO2 max measures how well that entire relay team performs at once. If any single runner in that team in that process is weak then the whole number will drop. So it is really just a single score for the
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combined health of your heart and your lungs, your circulation and those little engines inside your cells. That is why it tells us so much. And what raises that number, what raises your VO2 max in a nutshell is the right kind of
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exercise, which I'm going to come back to in a minute. The difference VO2 max makes to different people is enormous.
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So take two people of exactly the same age. The one with a high VO2 max can stride up a hill and hold a conversation at the same time, while the one with a low number is left breathless, just
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reaching the top of their stairs. They may not ever leave the house again. They are the same age, but they have completely different engines. And the research around this is actually really, really interesting. And there is so much
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research as well. One of the biggest studies of its kind followed over 100,000 people who had their fitness measured on a treadmill. What they found was that the least fit people had a risk of dying that was as bad as and in some
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cases worse than the killers that we are taught to fear like smoking and diabetes. And it kept going. The fitter people were the longer they tended to live. And the researchers found no ceiling where the benefit suddenly stopped. So in plain terms, being unfair
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is not some minor lifestyle footnote or some insignificant thing on the data. It sits right alongside the things that frighten us most, the things that we know kill us most often. And there is one more piece of biology that makes
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this really urgent for anybody watching, whatever your age. So from around your 30s onwards, your VO2 max naturally falls by roughly 10% every decade if you do nothing about it. That slow drain is a really big part of why people gradually
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lose the ability to climb the stairs without stopping and carry their shopping or get down on the floor and play with their grandkids. So raising your VO2 max is a bit like fitting yourself with a bigger engine. So that
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this slow decline that we're all going to get begins from a much higher point.
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A fit 60-year-old can carry the engine of an unfit 30-year-old. You are buying yourself really good, capable years at the end of your life. So the real question is how do you actually increase your VO2 max? And this is where the type
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of exercise really matters. So a large meta-analysis that pulled together more than 50 separate studies found that high-intensity interval training, which everyone knows as HIT or HIIT, is generally better at improving your VO2 max than just steady moderate exercise like a
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gentle jog or an easy bike ride. HIT simply means very short bursts of very hard effort with easier recovery periods in between. So on a treadmill or on a bike or walking up a very steep hill, it is the same idea. You go really hard for
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a minute or 30 seconds and then you ease off and then you go hard again. So, if we took just this one finding from this research study and we ignored everything else and I wanted to be as fit as
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possible for my next triathlon or just improve my VO2 max as high as I could, you could argue that I should only ever do HIT training interval work. But there is a serious problem with doing that and it's one that I learned the very hard
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way which I'll come back to in a moment. So the obvious question right now is why does the hard stuff work so well? Why are the intervals so good? Well, there are two reasons and both of them are
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fairly simple. When you push your heart close to its maximum, it is forced to adapt. The heart is a muscle like all of your other muscles on your body. And like any muscle, when it's put under demand, it gets better at its job. It
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learns to fill with more blood and pump more blood out with every single heartbeat. The second reason is that those short hard efforts send a very powerful signal to your muscles to build more mitochondria, which are those little
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energy factories in your cells. More engines or more factories means more oxygen is burned. It is this very brief sharp stress that drives the biggest adaptation. Now the research points to two specific protocols that work really well done around three times a week. The
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first one is called 1515. So you go hard for 15 seconds at roughly 90 to 95% of your max heart rate and then you ease right off for 15 seconds at around 60 or 70%. And then you repeat that pattern
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anywhere between 40 or 60 times. The second one is called 4x4. So here you go really hard for 4 minutes again at 90 or 95% of your maximum and then you recover gently for 3 minutes at around 70%. And
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then you repeat that whole block four times. Both of them are really proven to push your VO2 max up. And again, you can do this either running on a flat surface on a treadmill, on the bike, walking up
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a hill, or even in the pool, which I used to do when I was swimming for my triathlon training. Now, you might be wondering, how on earth do you even know what your maximum heart rate actually is? The simple rule of thumb is to take
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220 and subtract your age. Now, obviously it is far from perfect and it will be wrong or inaccurate for plenty of people, but as a free and easy starting point, it does the job to get you going. The better thing though is
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that a good smartwatch like a Garmin or an Apple Watch or, to be honest, most other fitness watches out there, they take most of the guesswork away. It will estimate your maximum heart rate for you. It will show your heart rates in
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real time and it will tell you exactly which zone you are training in as you go. And here's the really important point. HIT training for a 60 or 70-year-old looks v
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that matters is not your speed. It is what your heart rate reaches. So a slow jog for one person might be flatout effort for somebody else. And both of them can be doing proper interval training. Now, if you've got any health
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problems or you're getting on a bit or you know any concerns, then just please speak with your doctor first before doing any of this hit work. You know, none of this is personal medical advice.
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And you know, somebody who's not used to exercise, if you're a bit older, this could be a bit of a shock to the system.
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Now, after all of that, I want to be really honest with you. I made a video a couple of weeks ago, I think it was the 3rd of June, about the best overall approach to exercise for most people and
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hit absolutely played a part in it, but it was a very small part and there was a very good reason for that. So, let me tell you a story that I hinted at a couple of minutes ago. So, years ago, I
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was training for this triathlon and I am 6'4. I am on the heavier side. So, I'm not really built like a natural runner.
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Running is the discipline that I have always struggled the most with. And what happened was that almost every single running session that I did, without me really planning it, it would slowly creep up in pace until the last bit of
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it turned into a bit of a hit session where I was sprinting for different intervals towards the end. Now, during one of those sprints, I got a stress fracture. It was tremendously painful and it literally stopped me in my
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tracks. Now, a stress fracture is a small crack in the bone from all of that repeated pounding. And it stopped me running for a couple of years, and I was absolutely devastated. And the thing is, it wasn't just the running that was
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taken away from me. I had to stop all cardio for a few weeks and months. I had to go to physiootherapy. And I watched all of that hard one fitness simply vanish over days and weeks. months of careful building and planning and
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training and all of that effort had just gone and it set me back enormously and I didn't do another triathlon for years after that. But I was young and I recovered and I'm fine now. Now imagine that exact same injury happening in your
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50s or your 60s. A setback like that could easily become the thing that stops you ever getting back into cardio at all. Or it could knock your mood and your confidence so hard that you simply never exercise again. The injury is
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never just the broken bone. It is everything that that broken bone takes away with it. So basically what I'm trying to say is that the big risk with this approach to exercise, the big risk with hit, the thing that you absolutely
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have to respect is injury and how long the recovery from it can actually take.
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So if you have unlimited time and you are pretty flexible, then this is what I recommend. This is the bare minimum.
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Generally, the more exercise that you can do, the better. The first one is your steady aerobic base, which is two to three sessions of cardio a week, which is the gentlest stuff that you can hold a conversation through, like a
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brisk walk or a steady jog on the treadmill or half an hour or an hour on the bike or a swim. The second one is resistance training. at least two sessions a week that work all of your major muscle groups like push days and
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pull days and then legs and core as well. The third one is your hit sessions, so your interval sessions and that is just one or two sessions a week to sharpen that V2 max and keep your engine really efficient. And just to be
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clear, the steady aerobic exercise absolutely does improve your V2 max. it just doesn't do it as quickly as hit training. And the fourth one is simply daily movement. It means trying to break up all of that sitting time throughout
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the day so you spend as much time as you can on your feet. And all of this comes down to one word, which is reserve. So the bigger your engine, the more reserve you have in the tank. Because as we get
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older, things will happen. We will get ill at some point. We will have an injury. we will have a spell in hospital and you know we are all going to get those at some point. So the more reserve
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you've got in the tank to go in with the better you come out of the other side.
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Somebody who was already unfit and a bit frail at the age of 60 who has the same illness they very often come out the other side noticeably more frail and looking older than they were just a few short weeks ago. So the entire game here
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really is to try and go into older age, as fit and as strong as you possibly can. So that every setback, because there will be setbacks, only ever drops you a little way down the ladder instead of knocking you off that ladder. I hope
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that makes sense. So again, I hope you found this video useful and valuable. If you did, please support me by liking the video, giving it a hype as well, and subscribing to the channel. And I'll see you next time.
Topics:VO2 maxhigh-intensity interval trainingHIITlongevitycardiovascular healthfitness trackingGarminApple Watchmitochondriaexercise science
