terrymorse 

I found this questionnaire website in which you answer a bunch of questions, and it gives you a fitness age and VO2max estimate.

I tried it out, and its estimate for my VO2max seems pretty close at 56 (Garmin says 57, HRV4Training says 58).

It's part of a study by the Cardiac Exercise Research Group. Any way, here is the link: https://www.worldfitnesslevel.org/#/

Carbonfiberboy 

78 y.o., I got 46 y.o. and 45. I had a treadmill test which produced about the same athletic age.

rsbob 

Garmin states VO2Max is 47. Can’t believe how close the pole results are to Garmin.

Fitness level of an “average 37” YO? Oh crap - since most are slugs.

Kai Winters

I'm 68 and Garmin says it's 57 and I have the fitness level of a fit 21 year old...tell my prostrate that...the rotten sob

rsbob 

“Hilarious”, my stubborn and stingy prostate commented, “but too close to home”. Fitness of a 21YO?
Don’t stay up past 2 AM at parties.

sean.hwy

my garmin 1080+ says 49 for vo2 max but I know in my case that has to be off. I bike about 6k a year but none of it's training hard miles. I know my cardio is not great. I can bike for about an hour or two at 150 to 160 heart rate but I would fall over if ran two blocks.

I can climb/hike stairs for an hour plus without being out of breath but when I hike a 25%+ hill I am sucking wind after about 20 minutes. I can keep going but I am going way slower.

Jughed

According to that website - I should be out there racing a bit.

52 with a sub 20 fitness age and 61 VO2 max.

Garmin has me about 10 points lower... based on power and heart rate - more realistic.

rowerek

So based on ethnicity, level of education, height, weight, weekly exercise, waist (!) and BPM this incredible [sic] website can estimate VO2max. Wow!

They should have one more question: Do you believe these results as being reliable, valid and correct?
Based on the answer it should be relatively easy to estimate not only VO2max but IQ as well.

The question is: what are they selling?

VO2max

• Direct measurement: This is considered the most accurate method and takes place in a lab setting. You'll wear a mask connected to a gas analyzer while exercising on a treadmill, bike, or similar machine. The analyzer measures the amount of oxygen you breathe in and the amount of carbon dioxide you breathe out. This data is used to calculate your VO2 max, typically expressed in milliliters of oxygen consumed per minute per kilogram of body weight (ml/kg/min).
  
• Field tests: These are less precise than direct measurement but offer a more accessible alternative. They involve performing a specific exercise test, like the 12-minute Cooper run or the beep test. These tests use your performance and other factors like age, weight, and gender to estimate VO2 max through equations. Field tests are good for tracking changes over time but may not be as accurate for pinpointing a specific VO2 max value.
  

Carbonfiberboy 

You denigrate yourself unnecessarily. Just look around at other people. Your numbers are probably about right. Sure you could do better, but compared to what? When I was 18, I could run a 3000' plus climb with a brief walk midway where it was a little flatter. I assure you, that was not normal. Ultramarathoners walk the hills. Being one in 20 of your peers is not that great. Keep at it, become one in 10,000. As you get older and keep it up, you'll become ever more deviant. A good gym program has really helped me, especially when I was your age and just starting to get fit again. 6k a year is a LOT. Good for you. If you want to get better at running, you have to run. Work up to 2 miles/day and then do that almost every day. Fix you right up especially if you have some short hills. Short hills are everything if you want to get fit as a runner, 15' hills are great for cycling..

RChung

Woah. So I guess exercising doesn't have much effect on VO2Max.

The R^2 = 0.61 for men and 0.54 for women, so not super great -- however, for a population-level non-exercise test based only on answers to a quick questionnaire, that's pretty damn good. The published equations for predicting VO2Max used waist circumference (WC in the formula below) but the authors say that if they used BMI instead there were "negligible" differences in fit. That said, they didn't give the equation coefficient for BMI.

For men, their prediction equation was: VO2Max = 100.27 - (0.296*age) - (0.369*WC) - (0.155*RHR) + (0.226*Physical activity index)
For women it was: VO2Max = 74.74 - (0.247*age) - (0.259*WC) - (0.114*RHR) + (0.198*Physical activity index)

Their PA-Index was some combo of the answers to three exercise questions (how often, how long, and how intensely do you exercise).

Bottom line, for this population-level non-exercise metric, be younger, weigh less, and get a lower resting HR. I'm guessing that almost all of us who are reading this sub-forum already are in the "top" group of their exercise questions.

terrymorse 

I'd go further and say all hills are great for cycling: < 1' hills for sprint power, 3-5' hills for VO2max, 10-20' hills for threshold, > 20' hills for tempo/endurance.

One of my favorite training rides is just doing a bunch of little hills: go hard on the uphills, go easy on the parts in between. It really bumps up my power, and strengthens the legs.

My ride buddy calls this route "Terry's Leg Breaker". It's not that brutal:

terrymorse 

So if you want a high VO2max:

• be young
• have a tiny waist
• have a low resting heart rate
• exercise a bunch

Sensible.

Curious that all the factors are linear. Is that just because non-linear data fitting is too complicated?

RChung

Nonlinear fitting isn't complicated but it can be tedious, and there's a bias-variance trade-off. In effect, what that means is that you typically look for simple interaction or polynomial terms and if you don't get a big bang out of them you don't look much farther. (I teach some of this stuff, and I tell my students that linearity is both a powerful framework and a strong set of handcuffs).

In this particular case, their endpoint wasn't to find VO2Max; they were trying to see if they could predict long-term mortality. So they used estimated VO2Max in another equation (along with some other variables) to predict long-term mortality. That latter (also linear) relationship has an R^2 of ~ 0.5. But for population-level relationships, finding something like "lose weight and exercise more" isn't a bad public health message to send.

sean.hwy

They don't factor in height or weight just your waist size? This test seems flawed. If 170cm vs 200cm have the same waist size the 170cm person would be fatter.

seems like they should have used a waist to height ration number instead.
https://www.omnicalculator.com/healt...t-height-ratio

RChung

They wrote in their paper that they tried BMI in place of waist size, and it had "negligible" change in the fit of the equation. This is pretty common for these types of "predictive" studies: they're just looking for the best prediction rather than to understand the "causal path." If you're familiar with "technical time series analysis" for, say, stock prices, this is very similar to that approach: you don't really care about fundamentals or other "structural, causal" relationships or why a stock price goes up or down, you only care about whether you can predict changes in it. There are other times when you're interested in understanding why something changes, especially if you want to know how to modify behavior, but evidently prediction isn't really one of those situations.

canklecat

Same results I've seen from other quickie estimates. All wrong in my case. I've always been limited in VO2 max by lung scarring from childhood bouts with pneumonia and tuberculosis, and a minor heart murmur. I'm running the human equivalent to a Chevelle 283 with burnt rings and gummy carb.

PeteHski

You can’t really expect such estimates to take into account specific issues that clearly skew you from the norm.