Live Lung and Prosper

A VO2max Personal Health Experiment

Return On Investment

In the world of health and performance the current scuttlebutt around the ol' biomarker fire pit is VO2max. Long held as a marker lung capacity and a major factor in endurance, VO2max is getting lots of attention as the one ring to rule them all when it comes to predicting health and longevity. VO2max is the measurement of the maximum volume of oxygen that can be extracted from your lungs and delivered to working muscles.

Essentially this is the most scientific measure of aerobic fitness currently available. VO2max improves performance in terms of your ability to supply energy to muscles for work and recover effectively from bouts of effort. Not only that its reference as a marker for energy efficiency has strong implications for general metabolic health and disease over longer timelines. In short, there's lots of evidence that it's pretty dang important for both performance and longevity.

So I've concocted a personal health experiment with two points of interest in mind. First, I just want to know where I stand. Currently, I don't do any traditional cardiovascular training. I don't spend any extended periods of time running, cycling, swimming, rucking, etc. My fitness regimen is three days per week of strength/power and HIIT training and three days per week of jiu jitsu which is comprised of thirty minutes of live training per session. Two or three days a week I go on a leisurely walk with my wife in the afternoon. My curiosity is where does this land me in terms of my VO2max? Without any direct aerobic training regimen what grade to I get in aerobic fitness class?

Second, if I decide to change something what might yield the highest return on investment in time and effort. One of the big recommendations for improving VO2max right now is 120-180 minutes of Zone 2 training per week. Zone 2 is essentially a marker of exertion whereby your heart rate and perceived effort is sustainable for long periods of time. The common heuristic for that is a pace of work in which you could hold a conversation. I'm all for staying as healthy as I can for as long as I can but two or three hours a week on a bike or running? I'd rather get punched in the face. Literally. If I had that extra time I'd go take up Muay Thai again or do something far more stimulating. No offense to you endurance nerds out there. That's just a fun use of time for me. I want better aerobic health so I can continue to pursue a long and fulfilling life.

So then the question that was itching in my mind with all of this focus on VO2max is if my VO2max is in a decently high percentile for my age group, is it worth it to spend a lot of extra time an energy on it if I'm not actively pursuing an endurance specific outcome? What's the return on the investment. Furthermore, if I decide to improve my VO2max, what is there a more time and energy efficient way to do so?

That brings us up to the personal health experiment I've decided to try. As of this week I went to Old Dominion University's exercise physiology lab to have my VO2max tested and linked up with Isocapnic a breathing device company and Coach Luke Way to develop a protocol for my training. The rest of this article will focus on the results I got from my initial test as well as how the Isocapnic device claims to work and what we might be doing with it.

The Bicycle From Hell

I wanted to be as precise as possible in the before and after tests for this experiment so I went to the exercise physiology lab at Old Dominion University run by Dr. Patrick Wilson. There are some surrogate tests that don't require the special (and expensive) equipment found in an exercise physiology lab but I wanted to go all in. Like many university exercise physiology labs you can pay out of pocket to get lots of different fitness tests run such as body composition, resting metabolic rate, and of course VO2max. For all intents and purposes the test was cheap - $125. If you're interested I highly recommend looking into at a university close to you.

Maximal exercise testing is quite honestly, not fun. Well, it sort if is and sort of isn't. If you're into hitting the suffer button as a course of regular joy then you'll love it. If you don't like the feeling of truly emptying the gas tank, probably not. When you participate in a VO2max test you are on a specialized treadmill or stationary bike with a mouthpiece or face mask that is connected by airtight tube to a metabolic cart. This machine analyzes the gas exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide breath by breath during the entire course of the test. Along with that heart rate and perceived exertion are also measured.

After a warm up you get on the treadmill or bike. I'm not a runner and so did not want my lack of efficiency running to skew the test nor did I want my calves to blow up from the sudden exposure to an extended time running. The stationary bike used in these labs is not your average One Life Fitness bike. No, sir. It's a magnetic braking system that connects to the computer that running your test. This means that your power output is tightly controlled throughout the duration of the test. One fun aspect I was warned about before the test was that if I pedaled below a certain rpm it would be like I was slogging uphill through mud. This is because the bike will maintain whatever the set wattage is no matter how fast you pedal. So if you pedal slower, you pedal harder.

The test I did is referred to as a ramp test and is common practice for exercise testing. You start at a very easy and sustainable pace. After a minute your wattage (power output) is increased at a given interval and then you maintain that for the next minute. This process continues until you reach your maximal output or you call it quits. (You always maintain the right to discontinue the test). For me the test took around 21 total minutes of work. The first 15 were honestly not that bad. The last 3 had my legs burning like I was on a bike from hell. All in all a great way to spend a Tuesday morning.

After the test the computer system aggregates the data where points are looked at to determine fitness. Changes in heart rate, ventilation rate, and gas exchange are all considered to determine how well your body can use energy at various levels of exertion. Let's take a look at my test results and dive a little deeper into these metrics.

Pretty Fly For A Big Guy

"Pretty good for a guy your size." Was the first piece of feedback I got after the test was complete. I'm 6'3", 237.6 pounds on the day of the test, and between 10-12% body fat. Not the build of an endurance athlete by any stretch of the imagination. That's a lot of muscle mass to get oxygen to. Now that I've justified my pretty okay-ish score let's look at the numbers. Let's start with Dr. Wilson's breakdown of the report:

"Attached is a document with your results. Your VO2max was 40.6 mL/kg/min. In general, VO2max tends to be about 10-15% higher with running vs. cycling, largely because running involves more musculature. I reasonable guestimate for your VO2max with running is 45 mL/kg/min. That would put you in the ‘Good’ category for someone of your age and sex according to the normative data in the attached document.

I've highlighted your ventilatory thresholds in yellow and orange. The first ventilatory threshold (VT1) tends to correspond with the lactate threshold for most people. I pegged VT1 around 145-150 in terms of heart rate and 220 W in terms of power. So, Zone 2 for you might be something like 10-15 bpm below your VT1, roughly 130-140 bpm. Note, based on a 5-zone model, there is no physiological marker we can use to definitively demarcate zone 1 from zone 2, but a reasonable estimate of your zone 1 might be from 115-130 bpm.

Your second ventilatory threshold, which is sometimes called the anaerobic threshold, looked to be in the high 160s in terms of heart rate and just under 300 W in terms of power.In case you’re interested, here is a short video that does a pretty good job of explaining these thresholds and how they relate to training zones. Feel free to let me know if you have any questions about the data."

The actual charts with my data are attached below if you want further review. Concerning slight skew in the data because we did the test on a cycle those are normative percentages differences as found by Dr. Karl Wasserman, primogenitor of modern exercise testing. So my VO2max at current is in the 75% percentile of my age group. Factors such as body size, age, and genetics effect VO2max outside of fitness. All things considered this is pretty good. Well actually, good. Other factors that can effect endurance outside of VO2max are the other thresholds Dr. Wilson mentioned. Lactate threshold and anaerobic threshold are markers of how your body is using oxygen at these levels of exertion. Less oxygen is being used as an efficient fuel source and more of the oxygen is now being used to produce less efficient form of energy or buffer waste products respectively.

All three of these things are interesting potential changes that can be altered through known training programs. None are fancy but most are time consuming. That brings me back to my initial question. Is there an impetus to change this very much? If so what is the biggest ROI?

Breathing Better

Most of the time when we try to improve fitness and endurance outcomes we effect the energetic capacity through the use of sustained work at a given output. Those metrics are easy to assess and access. Doing sustained work is an important part, maybe even the most important part of improving VO2max. But what if there were another way? What if instead of focusing on the outputs alone we could constrain the gas exchange of the human body in a way that would drive the same adaptations? Would those be a more efficient use of time and energy? How would we do it?

Breath control for the purpose of manipulating gas exchange is not a totally new concept. Water sports athletes like free divers, water polo players, and synchronized swimmers have amazing lactate thresholds. There is some evidence that intermittent hypoxic training can help improve VO2max and anaerobic thresholds in athletes. In my personal experience learning to control breathing and slow ventilation down can create more efficiency by reducing perceived exertion and staving off ventilatory muscle fatigue.

While I have significant personal and professional experience with the development and administration of breathing protocols for these purposes it can be a difficult thing to adequately measure under the constraints of real time training. Heuristic practices are often the best we get. Enter the Isocapnic Breathe Way Better trainer. The Isocapnic BWB device is used frequently by endurance athletes to improve their fitness levels and has purported to improve VO2max - even in those who are already fit. The device is simple. It's essentially a mouthpiece with a bag that you breathe into for a given amount of time and repetitions either while in the process of training or as a separate training tool itself. In both cases the dose time requirement is significantly less than the 2-3 hours of Zone 2 commonly prescribed for improvements in endurance.

Just so that it's said explicitly, I have no relationship with this company and have no vested interest in their product other than my own curiosity. Does it do as they say? I honestly don't know yet. I'm going to work with Coach Luke Way of Isocapnic to develop protocols using the BWB device that can be integrated into the training plan I'm already engaged in. I'm doing this rather than spend time in specific wattages on a stationary bike because to be honest, I don't want to spend extra hours every week on a bike. I'd rather spend that currency elsewhere. Especially if I can go from good to excellent by for all intents and purposes breathing into a bag. All of that is yet to be determined. 

I'll be posting the protocol I'm using and more as I go along.

SMRTR

I have no idea what exactly come of this experiment to be honest. That's sort of the point of doing an experiment though. To have some hypothesis and then test it out. What I'm doing is certainly nowhere near as controlled as a lab setting. With that said, what I learn here will be good enough for me to improve knowledge about my own performance longevity.

If nothing else I'll have had a fun reason to pay closer attention to my health and performance for 6-8 weeks and learn something new. I'll definitely be posting the results at the conclusion of this experiment here on Substack. Minimally, I hope we all come out on top a little smarter and a bit more well informed.

If in the meantime you want to stay updated on this experiment follow me on Instagram -thecheckenginelight.

Thanks for reading,

Rob

---

Check out my book where I talk about these things and more:

checkenginelightbook.com