These three tips will help you stay fit as you get older.
By Matt Rudisil
There are a lot of things you should track as you age as a runner: your mileage, your heart rate, and your sleep quality to name a few. But are you paying attention to your VO₂ max?
Scientifically speaking, VO₂ max is the maximum amount of oxygen your body can take in and use, and it’s a marker of your cardiovascular fitness level.
For a variety of reasons, however, VO₂ max naturally decreases as you get older.
We recently took a deeper look at why this happens and why a regular running schedule is a great way for you to offset this decline. One thing you’ll find fascinating is the range of poor to excellent VO₂ max for men and women from their late 20s to their late 60s. If you have a recent score for VO₂, take a look at the charts below and leave a comment at the bottom of this story to let us know where you stand.
VO2 Max by Age Chart
Wondering what’s a typical rate of decline for VO₂ max? The charts below contain research-based averages of VO₂ max by age and fitness level, for men and women. Remember that each individual’s VO₂ max score depends on multiple biological and lifestyle factors; these are just a range of average scores.
Information provided by INSCYD, based on multiple research studies and exercise physiology publications.
Information provided by INSCYD, based on multiple research studies and exercise physiology publications.
Maintain Your VO2 Max
As with any metric, don’t worry if your score isn’t as high as you think it should be. And like most good things in health and fitness, the more you work at it, the more you can keep your VO₂ max where you want it to be. Here are three things you can do to keep your VO₂ max levels strong as you age:
- Diversify your training: do a mix of intense runs, strength training, hill workouts, and other types of runs so your body doesn’t stagnate.
- Don’t forget zone 2 runs: these are easier workouts that produce more mitochondria and capillaries in your body, essentially keeping your “engine” strong.
- Think 80/20: that’s 80 percent of your workouts being low-intensity and 20 percent are performed at higher intensities.
“There’s the saying, ‘We don’t stop exercising because we get old. We get old because we stop exercising,’” Todd Buckingham, Ph.D., exercise physiologist and visiting professor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, told Runner’s World. “Just by being active, you can prolong that level of VO₂ max.”
It can be that simple folks. Get active, and stay active!
