by Alec Chavez
Fun rating: 5/5
Difficulty rating: 3/5
What is the general purpose?
A VO2 max (maximum volume of oxygen) test is used to determine how aerobically fit someone is (i.e. how long and how hard they can exercise for).
Why do we use it?
Aerobic fitness has been shown to be a very strong predictor of health and disease risk. Generally speaking, individuals with low aerobic fitness have a higher risk of developing diabetes, cardiovascular disease, certain cancers, and can even put you at an increased risk of dying at a younger age. Oxygen is a necessary element involved in energy production in every single tissue of our body, which is why it is vital for our survival. Therefore, in our daily life and especially during strenuous exercise, the demands we place on our body must be matched by the oxygen we consume.
How does it work?
There are several different protocols to measure someone’s VO2 max. The gold standard measurement is to have the subject/patient exercise on a bike or treadmill while collecting their expelled air to measure oxygen consumption.
Generally, the procedure consists of a light warm-up phase (walking or low-grade cycling) followed by stages that become incrementally more difficult. For treadmill tests, this involves increasing the incline that the subject is running on or by increasing the resistance that the subject has to pedal against, if the test is done on a stationary bicycle.
As the stages become more and more difficult, there will be a point where the subject’s ability to extract oxygen from the air, which will be deemed their VO2 max, will reach a plateau. At this point, or shortly after, they will not be able to sustain that level of exercise and the test will stop.
Although the gold standard and most accurate way of measuring VO2 max is through collection and measuring expelled air, there are other indirect ways of being able to measure it as well, such as through your heart rate. Similar to oxygen consumption, your heart rate increases in a similar way as you exercise harder. In fact, the two increase at a very similar rate, which makes it very easy to determine one without knowing the other.
If you are interested in finding out what your VO2 max is without having access to the specialized equipment, check out this link, which gives you detailed protocol on how to complete various walk-based or jogging-based tests.
