VO2 max is the maximum level of oxygen your body can consume. Your body reaches its VO2 max once you physically cannot use any more oxygen, regardless of how much you’re taking in. Your workload rises, but your oxygen consumption does not.
When talking about VO2 max, you should keep a few terms in mind: intake, vital capacity and uptake. Intake refers to how much oxygen you’re inhaling. The maximum amount of air your lungs can expel after taking the largest breath possible is known as your vital capacity. Uptake refers to how much of that oxygen your body is actually using. Just because you have a large oxygen intake does not mean that you have a large oxygen uptake.
Why? Fresh oxygen is delivered via the cardiovascular system.
The cardiovascular system distributes the oxygen to your muscles which creates energy that drives muscle contraction. While this is happening, your cardiovascular system is also removing excess oxygen. If you take in more oxygen than your body can facilitate, the excess oxygen is released and goes unused.
Your body will use as much oxygen through this process as physically possible. This is known as your maximal aerobic capacity — another term for VO2 max . Any oxygen that you inhaled but did not uptake is released when you exhale.
All this goes to show that there’s more to oxygen uptake than just how much air your lungs can inhale. Therefore, it’s necessary to measure both the oxygen going into your lungs and the oxygen coming out to determine how much oxygen your body is actually using.
To calculate this, we use the Fick Equation: VO2 max = Oxygen Uptake x Cardiac Output
Consider these four factors when striving to achieve a big VO2 max volume:
- A big pumper: One of the benefits of being physically fit is the effect training has on your heart. A strong and healthy heart is able to pump more blood more effectively to your body when you need it.
- Hemoglobin-loaded blood: Hemoglobin is the protein molecule in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the body’s tissues and returns carbon dioxide from the tissues back to the lungs. The more hemoglobin in your blood, the more oxygen your blood cells can facilitate at once.
- A well-developed network of blood vessels: These deliver oxygen-rich blood to the muscles (arteries, arterioles and eventually capillaries where the actual delivery takes place).
- Aerobically adapted muscles: They consist of lots of mitochondria and aerobic enzymes to take in as much oxygen as possible before involving more and more sugar to produce higher outputs. Aerobically adapted muscles are more efficient at processing oxygen.
Why do I see two different values for VO2 max sometimes?
VO2 max is expressed in two ways: absolute and relative to your body weight.
Absolute VO2 max is expressed as the milliliters of oxygen used every minute. The average is around 2.5L/min for the untrained man, and around 2L/min for the untrained woman.
Relative VO2 max measures the same amount of oxygen, but compared to each kilogram of body weight. Simply, it’s the milliliters of oxygen used per kilogram of bodyweight. On average, the absolute VO2 max of an untrained man is 40-45 mL/kg:min , and closer to 30-35 mL/kg:min for an untrained woman.
What are average, good and great VO2 max values?
In 1994, David L. Costill, Jack H. Wilmore and W. Larry Kenney published the following VO2 max values for Untrained, Trained and Elite athletes:
FEMALE
| Training Status | Untrained | Trained | Elite |
| Absolute(l/min) | < 3.0 | 3.0- | >3.0 |
| Relative | 26-42 | 40-60 | 55+ |
MALE
| Training Status | Untrained | Trained | Elite |
| Absolute(l/min) | < 3.0 | 3.5- | >4.0 |
| Relative | 36-52 | 50-70 | 60+ |
You probably noticed that the Trained and Elite VO2 max levels overlap. We’ll get to this later, but what’s important to understand now is that having a high VO2 max doesn’t mean you’ll be a great endurance athlete — and vice versa. What matters is less about your VO2 max and more about the level of VO2 max you operate at.
What are the VO2 max values for top athletes?
Top-level endurance athletes can be as high as 6 L/min (men) and 4 L/min (women) putting men into the 80s and women into the 70s when tied to body weight, way up at the world level.
Below are the VO2 max values both for the world’s top athletes:
- Greg Lemond (m): 92-94 mL/kg·min
- Lance Armstrong (m): 84 mL/kg·min
- Miguel Indurain (m): 88 mL/kg·min
- Chris Froome (m): 84.6 mL/kg·min
- Flavia Oliveira (f): 76 mL/kg·min
- Oskar Svendsen (m): 97.5 mL/kg·min
- Joan Benoit (f): 78.6 mL/kg·min
For reference, a thoroughbred horse has 180 mL/kg·min (600 L oxygen per minute), and sled-dog huskies weigh in around 240 mL/kg·min.
Can I raise my VO2 max besides losing weight? If so, how much?
Losing weight will increase your relative VO2 max. However, weight doesn’t affect your absolute VO2 max.
When you look at the chart above, you’ll notice large differences between the Untrained, Trained and Elite athlete levels. While genetics play a significant role in VO2 max capacity (approximately 80%), untrained athletes still have room to improve by as much as 20%. That being said, it’s important to know that as you grow more fit, your VO2 max increases will become marginal. A VO2 max increase of even just 3-5% is impressive for an elite athlete.
This is where the importance of raising your power at VO2 max becomes the ultimate goal. As the name suggests, pVO2 max (VO2 max power) is basically just the wattage you can output while riding at VO2 max. It’s your power output when you physically cannot uptake anymore oxygen, regardless of your tidal volume.
In comparison to VO2 max, your FTP generally falls between 78-85% pVO2 max, with pVO2 max falling around 118-128% FTP. This is the reason why VO2 max workouts from TrainerRoad use 120% FTP as the basis for short, intense intervals. Erring near the lower end of the spectrum, these workouts allow you to do more work while still at a very high percentage of pVO2 max. That’s what really matters — spending time training at high percentages of pVO2 max.
When you work at high oxygen uptakes, the training stimulus is incredibly strong and potentially really productive if you train consistently, progress your training appropriately and recover effectively.
By training in this fashion, you can increase your time at pVO2 max, and maybe even increase the actual power you put out when riding at or near VO2 max. But most importantly, you can lift your FTP since greater upper-end power can create more room for increased max steady-state power.
FTP falls at a certain percentage of your pVO2 max. Remember that 78-85% statistic? An athlete whose FTP is currently 78% of their pVO2 max can push their FTP closer to their pVO2 max — maybe even as high as 85%.
However, there comes a point where you simply can’t push your FTP any closer to your VO2 max limit. That’s when it’s time to revisit VO2 max work and try for some of those VO2 max improvements mentioned earlier. Even if you’re a high-level athlete gutting it out for an extra 2-3% improvement, that increase will allow you to lift your FTP a few percentage points.
Let’s be honest, most of us haven’t pushed ourselves to the height of our aerobic capacity often enough to bump up against that VO2 max ceiling which leaves us a fair amount of room for improvement — possibly even greater than 3-5%.
How to Improve Your Power at VO2 max with Structured Interval Training
TrainerRoad offers tons of VO2 max workouts in various formats and progressions for every cycling discipline. Whether you’re training indoors due to time constraints, inclement weather or because you know it’s the most effective way to train, TrainerRoad will help you increase your VO2 max.
Although you can increase your aerobic capacity via slow, long-distance rides, they can’t do all the things that short, intense intervals can. Athletes using VO2 max intervals can achieve nearly all the benefits found in many hours done at lower, aerobic endurance intensities in just a few hours. And for those areas that VO2 max work doesn’t address? They’re taken care of throughout other aspects of TrainerRoad workouts.
Have questions about anything I covered above? Leave them below.
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Chad,
do you have any experience in using the “Hawley-Noakes Equation”:
VO2max [L/min ] = (0.01141 x Wpeak + 0.435)
with Wpeak being best 1-min-average-power during a ramp test (MAP test).
Will it give a reasonable VO2 estimate? Which MAP testing protocol should be used?
You can often find a ramp of 25W/min for non-elite cyclists (e.g. http://semiprocycling.com/map), but there are also other sources proposing slightly different ramps.
Any thoughts on this?
Thanks!
Hey Axel,
While I have only personal experience with using a formula to estimate VO2max based on ramp test data, I’ve read enough to know that they’re potentially useful but very protocol dependent. By that, I mean that one ramp protocol can overestimate peak aerobic uptake (usually the steps are too short for VO2 to stabilize) while another can underestimate it (steps are too long and fatiguing and riders get too cooked to reach true VO2max).
But what’s really important here is consistency in assessment protocol, just as it is with FTP assessment. So even if your chosen protocol poorly estimates your actual VO2max, maintaining that format from assessment to assessment (assuming it’s a reasonably close estimate) will at least let you know if your training is moving your capabilities in the right direction.
Another concern lies in the efficacy of workouts based on inaccurate estimates of your VO2max. So if you’re structuring workouts based on an estimate of your pVO2max and that estimate is off the mark, your training is subject to error. The good news is that you’ll probably suss this out after a few workouts should the efforts seem a little too easy or simply too hard to repeat (or recover from within a reasonable window of time).
Personally, I like the “PPO Ramp Test (2min Steps)” format found in the “PPO Group” team which is a public Team I created a while back. And while anyone can join it and use the test formats, it’s not formally supported in that we don’t interpret the results or scale workouts according to Max Aerobic Power, so it’s up to each rider to put the data to use (or not). 😉
Good catch, Simone. We’ll switch that around ASAP!
Hi Chad
Have there been any research regarding the length of the intervalls to most effectevly improve FTP and Vo2 max? Here you see people doing everything from 30 sec tabata intervalls to longer max intervalls up to 4 minutes.
I know that the Norwegian Cross country ski team that is dominating almost every race in the world cup introduced the “Norwegian” intervalls with 4 minuts of length.
Hey Mattias,
I’ve seen a few research articles where recreational as well as high-end athletes have seen excellent training responses from efforts in the 4 to 5-minute range with the repeatable effort falling somewhere close to 108% FTP, so I don’t doubt the efficacy of those longer, suprathreshold efforts which is why you’ll find them in numerous Specialty plans I’ve developed.
As far as shorter, more intense 2 to 3-minute efforts, I’ve found enough research and experienced enough positive adaptation personally as well as in riders I’ve coached when these efforts are sustained somewhere close to 120% FTP.
A lot of what these researchers were after is increasing the total time spent at high percentages of VO2max since there’s such a powerful training stimulus achieved there. But to accumulate these greater total durations, it’s really important to, as Veronique Billat puts it, work at “the lowest power output that elicits VO2max” thereby making them more repeatable and forgiving in terms of recovery time between workouts.
So I suspect that working for 4 minutes at a time, at a relatively high percentage of power at VO2max probably accomplish this a bit better than 2 & 3-minute efforts at slightly higher percentages of pVO2max (and FTP, of course).
Problem is, not too many athletes can tolerate the necessary level of discomfort for more than a couple, maybe 3 minutes at a time, especially when they’re new to VO2max work. But with time, a willingness to suffer, properly progressed workouts, adequate recovery, etc. most riders can lift their ability to hold – and repeat – these high wattages for 4-minute stretches in training (even longer in race scenarios).
Again, something I’ve employed to good effect in a number of Specialty blocks. 😉
When you have huge factual error in the very beginning of your article, it does not sound very good!
Check you facts first:
“The maximum amount of air your lungs can intake is known as your tidal volume.” This is not what tidal volume is, you might want to substitute it with Vital Capacity.
Just FYI
Thanks, Felix. Valid point and I’ll update the post. For clarification:
Tidal Volume: The amount of air which enters the lungs during normal inhalation at rest. The average tidal volume is 500ml. The same amount leaves the lungs during exhalation.
Vital Capacity: the greatest volume of air that can be expelled from the lungs after taking the deepest possible breath.
[…] Blog: How VO2 Max Work Makes You Fast — The Science Behind It All. Fast becoming my favourite training blog (and podcast!) Coach Chad Timmerman explains the […]
I am new to training with a power meter. How many VO2 Max sessions should I shoot for each week? I suspect the response will include, “it depends.” But any thoughts/direction would be greatly appreciated.
Congrats on the new equipment Mark! The number of V02 max sessions you should perform a week will have to do with what type of physiological adaptations you’re trying to achieve. On top of that, it’ll be dependent on the number of other sessions you plan on doing a week to maintain a proper ratio of training stress. You want to make sure to be doing other type of workouts to maintain things like aerobic capacity or muscular endurance.
Your best bet would be to take a look at our training plans to look and see which plans best suit the area you’d like to excel in. You can find that here: https://www.trainerroad.com/cycling-training-plans
There, you’ll see a brief description of what the plans are aimed to achieve. If you’re already a TR member, you can see these more in-depth after signing into your online career. There you can see a layout of your workouts and expand each week to see what each workout is meant to do for you.
Hope this helps!
That’s helpful. Thank you. So overall training stress load is something to watch out for.
Very informative. Question, how few times a week can you train and still show substantial improvement? I can only train twice per week. I only do power work, hills. After warm up I keep my heart rate above 140 for the entire ride. On good days I am above 160 for 75% of the ride. On the long climb, 9 miles, my heart rate will hit the 180s for one or two miles. My normal loop is 35 miles with 2400 feet of elevation change. I found a new out and back of 40 miles with 3000 feet of elevation change. I climb all the shorter climbs in the 400 to 500watt range. On the long climb I try to stay in the 250-300 watt range for about 3/4 of the climb, and above 300 watts for the rest. Now the stats, I have a max heart rate about 195 at the age of 57. When I was in my 30s my max heart rate was over 200. I have held onto my max heart rate rather well it seems. My FTP is close to 300 currently. I want to achieve an FTP of 350-400 watts. It has gone up 50 points over the summer while averaging 2.1 training rides per week. I think I am doing well but I am sure there is room for greater improvement. I am worried that without more training hours my improvements will flatten out. Any thoughts, really don’t think I can get more training hours…
It’s disappointing that VO2 can only be increased up to 20% from the untrained state because it suggests you need to “be born with it”. And….that after years of dedicated training you still won’t have the 5 minute power of an untrained “freak of nature”….or even likely the local hotshot before he started training.
Kudos on the article though, it’s appreciated 🙂
[…] Froome’s VO2max was measured at 84.6 W/kg. This is a very high value as can be seen in the table below from TrainerRoad – significantly higher than a typical trained athlete in the 50-70 range – although in the […]