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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   1862 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for May 3, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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Someone help me contextualize VO2Max scores versus the population.

So, I have a VO2Max of about 50 on a good day. Confirmed by a treadmill test in a lab but also corroborated by my fitness watches.

This translates to 90%ile for my age (42).

I find this disconcerting because I think I train really, really hard, and have been for a long time (several years). I started from some place like 30 though I haven't been measuring the progression that closely.

I'm surprised that despite all of the effort I put in, I'm only better than 9/10ths of the population. I'm not trying to, like, humblebrag here. I think this sucks. I'm pretty sure this doesn't mean 10% of the male population in their 40s trains harder than I do?

Is the rest of this explained by genetic variance or what? Do people who used to be on the running team in college just have that much banked up, versus someone like me who was sedentary for the first few decades of his life?

A few questions to help evaluate:

  • What is your VO2max?

  • When you say you've been training, how much do you mean you've been training and how?

  • What running times are you getting?

Regardless of the answers, quite a bit is indeed going to be a product of natural talent and cardiovascular activity during developmental stages. This is both the good and bad of picking endurance sports is that the performance is easily measured, straightforward to improve, and you'll be better than quite a few people... but also hopelessly behind quite a few people that don't even try all that hard.

Thanks for the feedback. Re: your questions: my VO2Max is 50 (was in second line of my post). I'm running 30+ miles a week. I do 70% of them at Zone 2, and run VO2 trainings (intervals) 2x per week. I pick up easy (Z1) or harder workouts (tempo/threshold) in there as well.

My best 5k ever is 23:45. I can do 1.7ish miles on a treadmill cooper.

I'm a bit overweight; about 23% body fat. I lift too, but I and am less disappointed with how that's going.

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