VO2 Max by Age: What Good Looks Like

VO2 max is the amount of oxygen your body can use per minute at full effort, expressed per kilogram of body weight. It is the strongest single measure of aerobic fitness, and one of the better predictors of how long someone lives that we have in medicine. The number has a normal range for your age and sex, and the question most people ask when they see theirs is simple: is this good?

Rough ranges

Population norms vary with the dataset, so treat these as approximate. In milliliters per kilogram per minute:

• Men in their 30s: average is roughly 38 to 43. Above about 50 is excellent.
• Men in their 40s: average roughly 35 to 40. Above the mid 40s is excellent.
• Men in their 50s: average roughly 31 to 36. Above the low 40s is excellent.
• Women in their 30s: average roughly 30 to 35. Above about 40 is excellent.
• Women in their 40s: average roughly 27 to 32. Above the high 30s is excellent.
• Women in their 50s: average roughly 24 to 29. Above the mid 30s is excellent.

Below those averages is where most sedentary adults sit. Women's numbers run lower partly because of lower muscle mass and lower hemoglobin, not because of a weaker response to training.

The gradient that matters

What makes the number worth chasing is how steep the relationship with survival is. In large cohorts, the biggest single drop in all cause mortality comes from moving out of the lowest fitness group into the next one up, and the benefit keeps climbing through the higher groups without a clear ceiling. The gap between the least fit and the most fit is roughly comparable to the gap between a smoker and a nonsmoker.

The mechanism is not mysterious. A higher VO2 max means a heart that pumps more per beat, more capillaries feeding the muscle and more mitochondria inside it. Those same traits go with lower rates of heart disease, stroke and early death in the decades that follow.

What moves it

VO2 max falls roughly 10% a decade after 30 if nothing pushes back, and faster in people who stop moving. Two things change that.

Training is the big one. Easy aerobic volume below the first threshold builds the capillaries and mitochondria. Hard intervals above the second threshold push the heart's stroke volume. Someone who has not been training can often raise their number 10 to 20% in a few months with a mix of both.

Body weight is the quiet one. Because the number is per kilogram, losing 10 pounds of fat raises VO2 max without any change in the lungs or heart. That is one reason we measure body composition and aerobic fitness together.

A test gives you the starting number, plus the VT1 and VT2 heart rates to train from. Retesting in six months tells you whether the plan worked.

That's the kind of thing we measure.

This article is educational and is not medical advice.

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