Catch Me If You Can: Breaking Down Vo2 Max & What it Means For Your Health

Welcome back to the Daily Dumbbell, we may not be very high on the charts, but we’re number one in your hearts!

Is this whole newsletter going to rhyme today? You’ll have to read on because we can’t say.

Today we’re taking a closer look at VO2 Max; not to be confused with the new and poorly branded HBO streaming service. That you inexplicably have to download a new app for. Like wtf HBO??

Today at a Glance:

• Vo2 Max: what it is & how to improve it

• A nifty new recipe

• 100 Short rules for a better life

• A fascinating article o

Let’s dive in!

Feature: VO2 Max

Ever found yourself panting and out of breath during an intense workout or even on the way up to your 3rd floor apartment in a complex that inexplicably doesn’t have elevators?

That's your body trying to deliver more oxygen to your muscles.

If you've wondered just how much oxygen your body can utilize during maximum effort, you've stumbled upon a key measure of aerobic fitness: your Vo2 Max.

What is Vo2 Max?

Vo2 Max, short for "Volume Oxygen Maximum", measures the maximum amount of oxygen your body can utilize during intense exercise. It's expressed in milliliters of oxygen used in one minute, per kilogram of body weight (ml/kg/min).

Or said another way: Wayyyyy too much math.

Simply put, it's a measure of how well your body can deliver oxygen to muscles and how efficiently your muscles use that oxygen.

Why Should You Care?

Vo2 Max is often seen as the gold standard for endurance capability and overall cardiovascular fitness. High Vo2 Max values correlate with better performance in endurance sports like running and cycling. But it's not just for athletes - a higher Vo2 Max can make everyday activities easier, reduce fatigue, and even improve your lifespan and quality of life.

• Should there be a drinking game where you have to take a drink every time we mention longevity? Eh? Could be fun!

Recent research suggests Vo2 Max may be one of the most important metrics when talking about health and longevity.

How to Test Your Vo2 Max?

The most accurate way to measure Vo2 Max is through a maximal exercise test conducted in a sports performance lab, where you'd run or cycle to exhaustion with increasing intensity while your oxygen consumption is measured. They’re about $150.

But don't worry, there are also simpler field tests and wearable fitness trackers (If you don’t care if the number is accurate) that estimate Vo2 Max, like:

• The Cooper Test (a timed 12-minute run) or

• The Beep Test (running back and forth over a 20m distance, keeping up with beeps that get progressively faster).

Did mention of the Beep Test bring back memories of domination or terror?

How to Improve Your Vo2 Max?

Improving your Vo2 Max essentially involves conditioning your body to use oxygen more efficiently. Here are some strategies in order of importance:

1. Endurance Training: Long, steady-state workouts at a moderate intensity can also boost your Vo2 Max by improving your heart's stroke volume (the amount of blood pumped with each heartbeat).

2. High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT): Intense exercise bursts interspersed with periods of recovery can improve your cardiovascular system's efficiency and raise your Vo2 Max.

3. Hill Workouts: Running or cycling uphill forces your body to adapt to a higher work rate and oxygen demand, which can help increase your Vo2 Max.

4. Strength Training: Stronger muscles can do the same work with less oxygen, meaning strength training can indirectly boost your Vo2 Max.

5. Healthy Lifestyle: Adequate sleep, a balanced diet, and avoiding smoking can all support improvements in Vo2 Max.

Remember, while Vo2 Max is a useful measure of aerobic fitness, it's just one piece of the puzzle. Fitness is a lifelong journey, not a race to the highest Vo2 Max.

But if it was a race we would win.

Thursday Things:

A Recipe: 

While we’re not paleo anymore, we do have family members who require gluten free/dairy free diets.

This looks delicious. Although we would probably not play along with the sugar free part of this one.

A Thread

Listen, you know we don’t like math. And 100 is a lot. We’d need 9 friends in the room to count that high.

But it reads quick and it’s pretty solid advice.

Longer Article

This article about the discovery of how to treat cholera is equal parts fascinating and in the first few paragraphs, unintentionally hilarious.

Cholera, before the use of IV bags was an incredibly deadly disease. You’d have vommiting bouts & diarrhea until your organs failed from dehydration.

A few of the more interesting takeaways:

• Latta discovered IV therapy in 1832 by injecting a saline solution directly into his patients veins. He published a case study in The Lancet and many other Doctors & Scientists reported they saw success from it.

• Unfortunately Latta died in 1833 from TB and by the time the next Cholera outbreak happened 15 years later the treatment was all but forgotten.

• A big reason why it didn’t catch on sooner was because they reserved this treatment for only the most gravely ill. So the survival rate was quite low. Which is an interesting parallel to the debate around ventilating COVID patients raging on the stupid side of Twitter today.

Oral Rehydration Therapy which is now the treatment of choice for children with diarrhoeal diseases consists of a mixture of sugar, salt, and water that you drink.

The article gets into the reasons we didn’t learn this sooner. Including the scientific breakthroughs in understanding that led us to get closer and closer…

And incredibly frustrating points in time when it seems insane that further investigation wasn’t taken into a promising treatment.

Why didn’t they follow this up?

The main reason: Scientists at that time hadn’t yet discovered that the presence of glucose increases the uptake of water and salt. This is the biological mechanism for why Oral Rehydration Therapy is so successful, but at the time it didn’t make any sense. So they moved on.

We’ll let you read the rest if it piqued your interest.

We hope you enjoyed today’s Newsletter! If you did, consider sending it to a friend or family member you think would enjoy it.

Make sure to come back tomorrow for Friday’s Newsletter where we’re trying something a little different.