How to Improve Your VO2 Max & Build Endurance

1. Dr. Andy Galpin

   The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play, and life, welcome to Perform. Hello, friends. I'm Dr. Andy Galpin. I'm a professor of Kinesiology in the Center for Sport Performance at Cal State Fullerton. And today's episode, we're going to be talking about specifically how to improve your VO2 max. In previous episodes, we talked about the heart. We went over what it is, how it works, why you should care about it. We also spent some time going over the three Is.

2. So how to investigate or assess your overall cardiovascular function, how to interpret that, to know whether it's good, bad, terrible or potentially a world record, and then how to intervene. So what to do about it and how to improve its function. If you missed that previous episode we did on the heart, please, go back and check that out. But I'd be remiss to not remind you or tell you for the first time about how important VO2 max is.

3. If you want all the studies, direct links, specific details on the statistics and values, you can see that in the previous episode as well as the show notes for that episode. But really quickly, your VO2 max is one of the most significant predictors of all cause mortality that we know of. In fact, if you compare it to more traditional markers like blood pressure, smoking history, cholesterol levels, while those are all very important, VO2 max can be two to three to even up to four-fold higher predictor of survival and mortality than those other traditional markers.

4. So it's insanely important and in fact, many folks would argue it is the most important metric to pay attention to if you want to know how long you're going to live. Now, I apologize for being overly dramatic about that, but really, it is that astounding about how important that number is to determining how long you're going to live. The other important point about this is there is no upper limit, such that the higher your VO2 max, the higher your chance of survival continues to go. It really doesn't seem to get to any point of diminishing returns.

5. And so it's a metric that is within your control. It is arguably one of, if not the most important metric for how long you're going to live. And the higher, the better. And so focusing on this, whether you want to run a marathon or want to play sports, it really doesn't matter. If you want to live longer and better, VO2 max should be one of your top priorities. But in today's discussion, I wanted to do something a little bit different, and that is really spend our entire time going over practical applications.

6. I want to walk you through exact programs and protocols, giving you both the concepts as well as specific methodologies as samples to help you get guided in either developing your own program or helping others with theirs. In order to do that, I need to start with a very quick overview of what we're trying to actually accomplish when we're improving our endurance or VO2 max so that you understand the different components that tend to be pretty similar amongst all different styles and training approaches. I promise we'll keep that very brief.

7. After that, we're going to jump right into a very specific protocol for improving your VO2 max. And then after that, I'm going to share with you a specific protocol a friend of mine used to complete his first ever marathon. Now, before we go too much further, I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsors because they make this show possible. Not only are they on this list because they offer great products and services, but because I actually personally love them and use them myself.

8. Today's episode is brought to you LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink mix that has an ideal ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium, but has no sugar. Electrolytes are critical to proper hydration, which I've been harping on for years. But you can't do that by only drinking water. In fact, many of you will probably remember that I featured LMNT in my YouTube series on optimizing hydration all the way back in 2020, which is obviously long before this podcast even existed. So I've been a fan of LMNT for a long time.

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