How fit is your heart and lungs?
Estimate it from a pulse, a walk or a run.
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How do you want to estimate it?
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How much do you move in a normal week?
VO2 max by age and sex, in ml/kg/min
| Age | Men, middle half | Men, median | Women, middle half | Women, median |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20-29 | 40.1 to 55.2 | 48 | 30.5 to 44.7 | 37.6 |
| 30-39 | 35.9 to 49.2 | 42.4 | 25.3 to 36.1 | 30.2 |
| 40-49 | 31.9 to 45 | 37.8 | 22.1 to 32.4 | 26.7 |
| 50-59 | 27.1 to 39.7 | 32.6 | 19.9 to 27.6 | 23.4 |
| 60-69 | 23.7 to 34.5 | 28.2 | 17.2 to 23.8 | 20 |
| 70-79 | 20.4 to 30.4 | 24.4 | 15.6 to 20.8 | 18.3 |
Measured on a treadmill with gas analysis, not estimated. The 70s rows rest on 137 men and 98 women, so read them as indicative, and there is no row past 79. Source: FRIEND registry, Kaminsky et al, Mayo Clinic Proceedings 2015, 7,783 tests.
All six together
nothing measured yetThree things the six tests measure, each against a published cohort. Two minutes apiece.
Results stay on this device unless you save them.
VO2 max is how much oxygen your body can actually use in a minute of hard work, per kilogram you weigh. It is the single best-studied measure of fitness there is, and the bottom quarter of it carried a larger adjusted death rate than smoking or diabetes across 122,007 people followed for a median of 8.4 years. A laboratory measures it with a mask. Everything short of that, including this page and your watch, is an estimate, and the good ones are accurate to about five points either way.
What actually raises it
Intervals, walking, and why the easy-pace advice everyone repeats does not hold up. Plus how much gain is realistic, and why it varies so much between people.
Common questions
What is a good VO2 max for my age?
Middle of the range for a man in his thirties is about 42 ml/kg/min and for a woman about 30. By the sixties those medians fall to roughly 28 and 20. The chart on this page gives the middle half for every decade from twenty to seventy-nine, measured rather than estimated, so you can see where you sit rather than guess.
How can I measure VO2 max without a lab?
Three ways, in rising order of accuracy. From your resting pulse, age, BMI and how much you move, which needs no exercise at all. From a brisk one mile walk, timed, with your pulse taken the moment you stop. Or from how far you can run in twelve minutes. The walk and the run are better because they actually stress the system the number describes.
How accurate are these estimates?
The resting pulse method carries a standard error of about 5 ml/kg/min, which is a whole band either way, and it is poor at detecting change over time because its inputs barely move when real fitness does. The walk test is about as accurate and underestimates in fit people. Use any of them to place yourself; do not use them to measure a month of training.
How fast does VO2 max decline with age?
The figure usually quoted is 10 percent a decade, which comes from comparing different people of different ages. Following the same people over time shows it accelerates: roughly 20 percent a decade in women after sixty and approaching 25 percent in men after seventy. The commonly repeated number understates late life.
Can I improve my VO2 max, and by how much?
Yes, and the honest answer is that it varies enormously between people. Across 481 sedentary adults on twenty weeks of supervised training the average gain was meaningful, but individual results ran from essentially nothing to very large, and about half of that difference is inherited. Interval work of three to five minutes has the best record. A typical gain of 6 to 7 ml/kg/min is enough to move most people up a band or two.
Is a watch VO2 max estimate any good?
It is an estimate built from your heart rate against your pace, so it is usually better than arithmetic and worse than a mask. The bigger problem is that it is not comparable between makes or even between firmware versions, so treat it as a number to watch against itself rather than one to compare with a friend.
Written and checked by the AskDoc Medical Team under our Medical Director, MBBS. How we review. Health education, not medical advice.