- Aug 15, 2018
- 622
- 346
- 63
VO2 max has moved from endurance-lab jargon to a headline longevity metric, and lifters now bump into charts telling them their number is a problem. Two questions are worth separating: how much can VO2 max actually be improved, and does a lifter need to chase it?
On trainability, the landmark data is the HERITAGE Family Study (Bouchard and colleagues), which put hundreds of sedentary people through a standardized 20-week endurance program. The average improvement was around 15–20 %, but the spread was enormous — some participants gained dramatically, a small fraction barely budged on that particular program, and much of the variation clustered in families, suggesting a strong genetic component to both baseline and response. Later work has softened the "non-responder" story: when studies increase the dose or change the stimulus, most apparent non-responders to one protocol do improve, so "I can't raise my VO2 max" usually means "that dose didn't do it."
Why should a lifter care at all? The mortality data is hard to ignore. A 2018 JAMA Network Open analysis by Mandsager and colleagues, covering over 122,000 patients, found cardiorespiratory fitness inversely associated with mortality with no observed upper limit of benefit — the fittest group had dramatically lower risk than the least fit. Fitness also underwrites training itself: better aerobic capacity means faster recovery between sets and sessions, better work capacity in the later sets where growth stimulus lives, and cheaper tolerance for the conditioning work that keeps body composition and blood pressure in line as you age.
The good news for people who hate running: the dose needed for meaningful fitness gains is not a marathon program. Interval-based work a couple of times a week — even relatively short sessions — reliably raises VO2 max in studies of recreationally active adults, and resistance training alone produces small improvements in the untrained. The trade-off to manage is total fatigue and recovery budget, not some absolute incompatibility between cardio and muscle; the interference research says concurrent training is manageable for all but advanced endurance-strength combinations, especially with sensible scheduling.
Have you ever tested or estimated your VO2 max, and do you program anything specifically for it — intervals, a conditioning day — or does fitness just come along for the ride with your lifting?
On trainability, the landmark data is the HERITAGE Family Study (Bouchard and colleagues), which put hundreds of sedentary people through a standardized 20-week endurance program. The average improvement was around 15–20 %, but the spread was enormous — some participants gained dramatically, a small fraction barely budged on that particular program, and much of the variation clustered in families, suggesting a strong genetic component to both baseline and response. Later work has softened the "non-responder" story: when studies increase the dose or change the stimulus, most apparent non-responders to one protocol do improve, so "I can't raise my VO2 max" usually means "that dose didn't do it."
Why should a lifter care at all? The mortality data is hard to ignore. A 2018 JAMA Network Open analysis by Mandsager and colleagues, covering over 122,000 patients, found cardiorespiratory fitness inversely associated with mortality with no observed upper limit of benefit — the fittest group had dramatically lower risk than the least fit. Fitness also underwrites training itself: better aerobic capacity means faster recovery between sets and sessions, better work capacity in the later sets where growth stimulus lives, and cheaper tolerance for the conditioning work that keeps body composition and blood pressure in line as you age.
The good news for people who hate running: the dose needed for meaningful fitness gains is not a marathon program. Interval-based work a couple of times a week — even relatively short sessions — reliably raises VO2 max in studies of recreationally active adults, and resistance training alone produces small improvements in the untrained. The trade-off to manage is total fatigue and recovery budget, not some absolute incompatibility between cardio and muscle; the interference research says concurrent training is manageable for all but advanced endurance-strength combinations, especially with sensible scheduling.
Have you ever tested or estimated your VO2 max, and do you program anything specifically for it — intervals, a conditioning day — or does fitness just come along for the ride with your lifting?