summarize "The beauty of this is that VO2 max can always be improved by training,
no matter how old you are. Don’t believe me? Then let me introduce you to
an amazing Frenchman named Robert Marchand, who set an age-group world
record in 2012 by cycling 24.25 kilometers in an hour, at the age of 101.
Apparently, he wasn’t satisfied with that performance, so he decided he
needed to train harder. Following a strict program designed by top coaches
and physiologists, he managed to boost his VO2 max from an alreadyimpressive 31 ml/kg/min up to 35 ml/kg/min, which would put him in the
elite 2.5 percent of men in their eighties. Two years later, now 103, he came
back and broke his own record, riding almost twenty-seven kilometers in an
hour. That’s impressive, and it shows that it’s never too late to improve your
VO2
 max.
Even if we are not out to set world records, the way we train VO2 max is
pretty similar to the way elite athletes do it: by supplementing our zone 2
work with one or two VO2
 max workouts per week.
Where HIIT intervals are very short, typically measured in seconds, VO2
max intervals are a bit longer, ranging from three to eight minutes—and a
notch less intense. I do these workouts on my road bike, mounted to a
stationary trainer, or on a rowing machine, but running on a treadmill (or a
track) could also work. The tried-and-true formula for these intervals is to go
four minutes at the maximum pace you can sustain for this amount of time—
not an all-out sprint, but still a very hard effort. Then ride or jog four minutes
easy, which should be enough time for your heart rate to come back down to
below about one hundred beats per minute. Repeat this four to six times and
cool down.
[*4]
Source: Mandsager et al. (2018).
Group comparisons for VO2 max are Low (bottom 25%), Below Average (26th to 50th
percentile), Above Average (51st to 75th percentile), High (75th to 97.6th percentile), and
Elite (top 2.3%).
You want to make sure that you get as close to fully recovered as possible
before beginning the next set. If you fail to recover sufficiently between sets,
you will not be able to reach your peak effort in the working sets and you’ll
consequently miss the desired adaptation. Also, be sure to give yourself
enough time to warm up and then cool down from this intense effort.
The good news, I suppose, is that you don’t need to spend very much time
in the pain cave. Unless you are training to be competitive in elite endurance
sports like cycling, swimming, running, triathlon, or cross-country skiing, a
single workout per week in this zone will generally suffice. You’ll pretty
quickly find that it boosts your performance across the rest of your exercise
program as well—and, more importantly, in the rest of your life.
I learned this lesson very vividly not long ago, when my wife and I had a
very tight connection at Heathrow Airport in London. Anyone who has
connected there knows that getting from Terminal 5 to Terminal 3 is basically
a trip within a trip. The only way we were going to catch our connecting flight
was to run the equivalent of a mile in less than eight minutes, while each
carrying a twenty-pound suitcase. This was not going to be a zone 2 effort; we
were going to have to go much harder than that, for eight straight minutes.
We needed to be able to produce a burst of power that was much closer to
our VO2
 max than to zone 2.
In that moment, we were in a situation not all that different from what our
hunter-gatherer ancestors frequently faced (apart from the setting, obviously).
Besides being much more fun than traveling through airports, hunting
requires 95 percent slow and steady effort, and 5 percent all-out intensity. If
you were going to have a chance to kill the antelope or mammoth or whatever
else you were tracking, you really needed that extra power to close the deal.
My point is that if you really stop to consider the kind of aerobic fitness
that most people actually need in the course of their lives, it basically boils
down to being really good at going slow for a long time, but also able to go
hard and fast when needed. Training and maintaining a high level of aerobic
fitness, and doing it now, is essential to preserving this range of function in
your later years.
In a way, maximum aerobic output is like guitarist Nigel Tufnel’s special
amplifier, in the classic film This Is Spinal Tap: Where most amps only let you
turn the volume up to 10, his went up to 11. As he memorably explained, “It’s
one higher.”
Every once in a while, it’s nice to have that range. We made our flight
with a few seconds to spare."