The guide

How do you raise VO2 max?

By GyroscopeUpdated November 15, 202617 sources

Do cardio most days and make one or two sessions a week hard: four 4-minute efforts at 90 to 95 percent of your max heart rate, with 3 easy minutes between. Across 28 trials, steady training raised VO2 max by about 5 points and intervals by about 5.5.

Zone 2 or intervals?

Online, it’s turned into a fight between two camps. One says go slow, stay in zone 2, an easy pace you can hold a conversation at, and log the hours. The other says long easy sessions are a waste and short, brutal intervals are all you need.

Both camps are holding half the answer. When researchers pooled 28 controlled trials in 723 healthy adults aged 18 to 45, steady endurance training raised VO2 max by 4.9 ml/kg/min against no exercise, and interval training by 5.5 (Milanović 2015). Intervals came out ahead by 1.2 points when the two were compared head to head. That means steady work builds most of it, and the hard minutes add a bit more on top.

Where the hard minutes really earn their place is when you’re already fit. In a 2007 trial, steady running didn’t move fit men’s VO2 max significantly in eight weeks, and the 4x4 did. Zone 2 is the best way to raise your VO2 max has the details, and bodyfat.guide covers the other easy-zone belief, the fat-burning zone.

A simple way to picture it

Think about getting stronger at lifting. Carrying groceries every day keeps your arms in decent shape. But if you want to lift more, at some point you have to put a weight on the bar that’s hard to move for a few reps.

The 4x4 is that heavy weight for your heart, and steady cardio most days is the groceries.

The session

Warm up for about 10 minutes, then 4 minutes hard and 3 minutes easy, four times, then about 5 minutes easy to cool down. The four rounds take 28 minutes.

How hard is hard? The original trial used 90 to 95 percent of your max heart rate. The easy minutes are at about 70 percent, a jog or brisk walk, not a stop. If you don’t use heart rate, aim for about 16 on the 6 to 20 effort scale, where 20 is the hardest you can imagine. That’s what the Generation 100 trial used for people in their 70s. In practice the fourth effort should be tough to finish at the same pace as the first.

Max heart rate here is 208 minus 0.7 times your age (Tanaka 2001), and zone 2 is 60 to 70 percent of it, the band Garmin and most watches use. In 3,320 healthy Norwegians, about 1 in 3 had a real max more than 11 beats from the best formula, so a measured max beats all of these. Your max heart rate is 220 minus your age explains why we don’t use the old rule.

What to do it on. Run uphill, walk fast up a steep hill, or use a bike, a rowing machine or a pool. The heart doesn’t care which. If running hurts your joints, pick the bike, the rower or the hill walk.

On a beta blocker or another heart rate medicine? Your heart rate is held down, so these numbers don’t apply. Use the effort scale (about 16 for the hard minutes, about 13 for steady) and ask your doctor before you go hard. See is it safe to push hard?.

How much does it move?

Half a liter a minute is about 6 points for someone who weighs 80 kg (176 lb).

Why do the hard minutes work?

VO2 max is capped by how much blood your heart can pump, and training raises it mainly by raising that (Bassett and Howley, 2000). In the 4x4 trial, the men’s stroke volume, the blood pushed out per beat, rose about 10 percent after interval training, and the rise in VO2 max matched it.

Four minutes at 90 to 95 percent of your max heart rate keeps your heart working close to its limit, and the 3 easy minutes let you recover enough to do it four times.

Steady work counts too. It’s how most people build the base, and in the 28 trials it was bigger in younger people and in longer programs. The hard sessions sit on top of it.

What should your week look like?

It depends on where you’re starting.

The 150 minutes come from the US adult guideline, which also asks for muscle-strengthening work on at least 2 days a week. Walking first if you’ve been inactive follows the American College of Sports Medicine’s screening advice. Starting the hard session at week 5 is our own choice. Generation 100 used two sessions a week in people in their 70s, and the 4x4 trial used three a week for eight weeks. In 24 trials, brisk walking alone raised VO2 max in people who had been inactive (Murphy 2007).

This is a typical plan. The Gyroscope app personalizes yours, and the quiz builds a dated 12-week block from your answers.

Why do some people barely improve?

People really do differ. In the HERITAGE study, 481 sedentary adults from 98 families did the same 20-week program. The average gain was about 400 milliliters a minute, but some people gained little or nothing and others more than 1 liter a minute. Family members tended to respond alike, and the researchers put the heritability of the response at up to 47 percent.

But “little or nothing” usually means “not enough yet”. In a 2017 study, 78 healthy adults trained 1 to 5 times a week for 6 weeks. With one session a week, 69 percent didn’t improve. With four or five, nobody failed to. Then everyone who hadn’t improved did another 6 weeks with two extra sessions a week, and every one of them responded. If your number hasn’t moved, add a session before you blame your genes. VO2 max is mostly genes has the rest.

How long until it shows?

The trials that show clear gains ran for 6 to 13 weeks, mostly with three sessions a week. Retest after 8 to 12 weeks, with the same method under the same conditions. A watch updates slowly and can drift for reasons that have nothing to do with you, and a change smaller than 2 to 4 points is inside the error of most methods (INTERLIVE 2022). How to measure it has the tests.

One catch if you train on hills or indoors. Apple Watch only learns from outdoor walks, runs and hikes on fairly flat ground, so hill repeats and treadmill intervals raise your fitness without telling the watch. Keep one flat outdoor walk or run a week and the gain shows up there. Getting an accurate number from your Apple Watch has the details.

What happens if you stop?

You lose some of it quickly at first. Seven endurance-trained people stopped training completely. Their VO2 max fell 7 percent in the first 21 days and settled 16 percent lower by day 56 (Coyle 1984). Most of the early drop came from the heart pumping less blood per beat.

They didn’t fall all the way back, though. After 84 days off, they were still at 50.8, against 43.3 in people who had never trained, partly because the extra capillaries in their muscles hadn’t gone anywhere, so training leaves something behind. A week off for a holiday or a cold costs very little.

Recovery between hard days

Hard sessions need easy days around them. If you track HRV, it’ll often dip the day after a hard session, and hrv.guide explains why it’s low after a workout and what raises it. Cardio also lowers blood pressure, which bloodpressure.guide covers.