As others have said it’s a trade off not a paradox, You can also report vo2max in absolute terms, L/min, this is how rowing generally reports vo2max because their athletes are so large that their relative vo2max is small comparatively, but their absolute vo2max are sometimes 5.8 l/min but they weigh 200 lbs, to put this into comparison an elite cyclist weighing 146lbs like Tadaj Pogacar with a vo2max of 80 would have an absolute vo2max of 5.3l/min. Bottom line is, as long as you have a requisitely high vo2max you will get most of the benefits even if you gain some muscle which could dilute the relative value a bit
I don't think it's really a trade-off. When you dig into the reasons why a high vo2 max is beneficial, I don't know of any that are in any way compromised by packing on some muscle. Your arteries aren't stiffening and your heart isn't getting weaker. Like BMI, and basically any physiological measurement, it's imperfect, and is going to lead you astray in some corner cases if you're not looking at the bigger picture.
I think this is essentially what you were getting at with the rest of your comment, but I think it's worth being clear about the fact that it's just an artifact of a metric that's not perfect--not an indication that something has actually been sacrificed by gaining muscle.
Maybe more blood flow is needed for bigger mass, dropping the rate of oxygen consumption since that is what vo2max is, just a stab at the dark, not a scientist.
This is literally it, more muscle / general mass needs more oxygen to function. A tiny stick with oversized lungs that starts floating as soon as he takes a deep breath is the ultimate VO2 max machine :p
If Tadaj jumped on the crossfit bandwagon and put on 40 lbs of muscle his vo2max would drop by about 25% all things equal. Is he less fit from a longevity perspective?
This is [Goodhart's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law) in action. V02 Max was a good approximation for health/exercise/fitness. For someone at a below average or average V02 Max, moving to above average is fairly un-controversially better for longevity.
The difference between top 1% and top 5% is getting into esoteric territory. If you dropped from 1 to 5% b/c you become more sedentary it's probably slightly negative for longevity, but if you dropped b/c you packed on muscle it's very much unclear, and probably hard to provably study. It's certainly not clear enough that you can say that your muscle is "bad".
A recent episode had a protein expert on that was theorizing that the descent into elder frailty is not linear, but rather a series of cliffs that you fall off of that lead to muscle and strength loss. Maintaining high protein intake during periods of recovery (like from a knee replacement) was the point, but also the more muscle you have the more room you have to lose muscle before you start hurting your quality of life or risking a deadly fall.
TL;DR Don't worry about it, your 95th percentile V02 Max is fine (and if you're not measuring in a lab, you're probably guessing anyway)
I don't believe so. As I said, when you look at \*why\* a high VO2 max is desirable, none of that is being compromised by adding muscle--or even fat, for that matter. You should be asking why it is that when calculating VO2 max, you divide by body weight. To my understanding, it's basically because it was developed as a metric to assess someone's ability to power the things they want to do with their body--and a larger, heavier body requires more energy to perform the same tasks. If you add weight without increasing the amount of oxygen your body can process and distribute, then you've almost certainly decreased, for example, your ability to run really long distances quickly. But your cardiovascular system is still just as capable of supplying all that oxygen and discarding all the waste--and that's almost certainly what's critical for longevity and basic health.
Also, given that your mile time is coming down and your FTP is going up, I'm betting that if you look at your V02 max without normalizing for weight (just multiply your numbers by your weight at the time rather than looking at the percentiles), you'll find that you're now processing more oxygen than you were before. Or it's possible that you're primarily adding muscle in places that make your running and cycling more efficient/effective--or you're just improving your technique to use the energy more efficiently.
This. My understanding is that muscle mass does not decrease absolute VO2 max and if anything it likely increases it, but there is an expected trade-off for normalized (relative) VO2 max as muscle weight disproportionately increases relative to VO2 gains.
I know that it is most commonly used as a weight-normalized metric, but not sure it is by definition normalized? Would love for an expert to chime in as I would like to know.
This is my response from above: VO2max can be reported as an absolute (L/min) or relative to body weight (ml/kg/min). So both are reported it doesn’t have to be weight normalized. But when normalizing to body weight it’s easier to compare individuals
VO2max can be reported as an absolute (L/min) or relative to body weight (ml/kg/min). So both are reported it doesn’t have to be weight normalized. But when normalizing to body weight it’s easier to compare individuals
As muscle mass goes up, times slows down so you live longer, vo2 max only appears to go down. You’ve created time dilation and solved the general theory of longevity, congratulations
People suggesting using Lean mass for the calc aren't making sense. To your point, vo2max would continue to drop as you packed on lean muscle.
The obvious answer is the just use raw vo2 output rather than dividing by kgs. Your goal should be to increase your output as you continue training regardless of weight. This will make it harder to compare to others but from a personal progress perspective it's probably directionally better.
Not an expert but have read a fair amount about v02max and imo it is overhyped, especially at the top end, and the old end. What I mean by that is if v02 is super low at any age then of course that is bad because it pretty much means you're either very inactive and/or struggling with major health problems. And at the old end, it really drops off a cliff as people break hips, have heart attacks etc. But I haven't seen any proof that having an extra high v02 in young or middle age equates to having a high one in old age, which is my same criticism with Attia telling everyone to build muscle and eat protein etc. You can have top 1% muscle mass and v02 at 50 and still have raging atherosclerosis that kills or permanently disables you at 51. Rather if we're going for a long health span (and hopefully lifespan), the main thing is to be active enough to have a not low v02 max, and avoid the heart disease/strokes/drugs as you get older that cause the v02 declines. If you do that for long enough you average v02 will eventually be top 1% as others your age decline. In other words, I think it's very possible that if you just have an average v02, but hang onto it for longer than most by eating healthy and gardening or whatever, I think that's probably the key. That's my hot take at least.
I've always found a major flaw with doctors and PHDs in these sort of fields is that it generally attracts high achieving people and high achieving people are suckers for a magic number they can better than others at.
Many prescribed drugs including metformin (even when taken correctly) can cause dizziness and other things that increase possibility falls/getting hurt from falls. I would also go so far as to say that is probably signficantly underreported/studied especially when people are taking multiple drugs. I'm not sure where coke falls on that spectrum though:)
What do falls have to do with VO2 max?
Dizziness is a very uncommon side effect of metformin, and I think it’s safe to say the benefits for most people far outweigh the risks
When an elderly person breaks a hip or anything that causes disability v02 max and muscle mass decline very quickly. It's crazy how fast an elderly person can lose muscle when stuck in a bed.
Dizziness comes up when you google common side effects of metformin, I don't know what the statistical significance is but that is just one of many commonly prescribed drugs and doesn't account for poly-pharmacy.
Agreed.
Add knee replacements, pneumonia and/or any other chronic or semi-acute-chronic condition or disease to those strokes, heart attacks or broken hips and your hard-earned VO2 / muscle mass / strength / balance will also plummet.
Legit cannot figure out why you’re being downvoted for this
People gonna lose their minds when they find out/Peter finally admits what getting Covid repeatedly does to the cardiovascular system (amongst others)
Yeah. Common in circlejerk subs where followers of a guru are irritated when faced with sobering facts and reality-checks.
Heck, even elite athletes know how fast they’ll lose their edge, their strength and cardio/VO2 max fitness, when ill. And are scared sihtless of it.
Imagine normal-Joes and Josephines > 50-60-70 yrs old, when set back with a few weeks or more in bed.
Sure, they’ll be more ahead compared to their peers at first, but that delta will sadly quickly diminish or disappear at that age, with each passing day being sedentary - not lifting weights or doing 4 x 4 Norwegian VO2 Max workouts - due to an unforeseen (but very common) injury or illness, as they age.
The Ultimate Warrior, HHH, these are examples of people who had top tier muscle genetics, and extraorrdinary VO2max for their profession. HHH still had a heart attack. Ultimate Warrior died from heart failure. The steroid use may play a role, but even if it didn't, it's not so much how you were when you were young, but whether or not you can sustain that genetic potential.
>Suddenly everyone is promoting vo2max as a leading longevity metric, second only to muscle mass.
What? Vo2max is much more important than muscle mass, and this is not a new discovery, I'm not sure where you got the idea that muscle mass would be even near. Muscle mass actually seems to have a pretty low cap for benefits, studies often find no difference between 50% percentile and higher.
Yeah, you are probably slightly overmuscled, if we only look at longevity markers. This won't make a meaningful difference and you probably enjoy being muscular for other reasons too, so no, you shouldn't lose it, but if the question is purely about what predicts living longer, ml of oxygen per kg per minute does, with no seeming cap, the very elite shows benefits.
If a person is a muscle levels where they would have longevity benefits from adding muscle, they will generally be able to use more oxygen too when to do. A person who goes from not being able to climb stairs to being able to squatting with a weight will add muscle, but that muscle will use oxygen and improve vo2max too. In Attia's episode #294, Olav Bu explains they saw the same thing in the elites too: when his Olympian triathletes lost weight, their relative vo2max didn't actually go up!
It's not a bad idea to use absolute vo2max (L/min) in tandem with relative (ml/kg/min) and it's not a perfect measurement, but this should be a caveat for muscle mass (don't add too much or you start losing your vo2max), not vo2max.
That would still be pretty far from what the data says. Not only is there no difference between groups above 50th percentile for all cause mortality, but even the most muscular to least muscular effect is substantially smaller than the cardiorespiratory fitness effect
https://www.amjmed.com/article/s0002-9343(14)00138-7/fulltext for one example.
Everybody should strength train and sarcopenia is very bad, but there's no reason to overstate the effect.
Peter says it’s a rate problem- and recommends to add as much muscle as you can before 50 because afterward gaining is hard and the muscle is longevity money in the bank that you will inevitably lose over time. Obviously within reason- I for one have a busy life and am not trying to be mr Olympia and not considering roids
Well, I think that's a reasonable strategy, even though there's actually little evidence for it. This study https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3337929/ for example found that being in the weakest 33% in middle age was bad for longevity, whether you were in the middle or the strongest third did not make a difference. Also, many studies show you can add muscle deep into your 70s and 80s, and maintaining muscle is not that hard, and going fully sedentary makes you lose it really fast - plenty of people who were gym rats in their 20s but it's all gone when they hit 50. But it's certainly better to do something early rather than show up at the gym when you are 60, so the guidance is not bad for most.
Given how much stronger vo2max is at predicting longevity, including vo2max in midlife, it should probably be amended to "bank as much muscle as you can without disturbing your cardiorespiratory fitness progress".
I would put it differently, as in bank as many sustainable healthy habits as you can and do as much atherosclerosis prevention as you can, muscles aren't worth much if you can't supply them with blood. But that wouldn't sell much elk jerky:)
Well, this is not a paradox. It's a trade-off. Trade-offs exist in all sorts of realms.
Training for ultra-endurance tends to come at the expense of explosive power. Why is no one talking about this caveat?
Ultra endurance is not the same as vo2max though, so it'll depend. Looking at elite athletes, yeah, ultrarunners are making that tradeoff, and Kilian Jornet does not have a ton of explosive power. Cyclists are to a degree - yeah, Jonas Vingegaard or Tadej Pogacar will lose a flat sprint to a sprint specialist who is more focused on explosiveness, but they are still putting in incredible numbers in uphill accelerations. Cross-country skiers or triathletes, not that much really - Johannes Høsflot Klæbo or Kristian Blummenfelt will do pretty nicely on explosive power.
Yep, it’s not the same thing bc it’s a comparison. Illustrating the nature of a trade-off.
Elite athletes will, of course, be elite outliers in more ways than one. That doesn’t negate the nature of trade-offs and diminishing returns.
This is not a caveat, it’s an optimization problem. Obviously if you only run and do not strength train, you put yourself at risk of frailty as you age. And, if you only focus on muscle mass but do not train your aerobic systems, you put yourself at risk of cardiac issues as you age.
Just train both, and do your best to maximize each without sacrificing the other. If you want to tackle a strength challenge or train for a race, that is great, go for it - just know that you will lose some gains on the side you shifted your focus from. After the race, go back to a balanced lifestyle.
That’s all fair, but it’s a great target for most people because it means train to gain endurance, or cut fat to reduce the denominator. You are an edge case.
Weight has a lot to do with VO2max. But not just weight, also genetics. In your case you have top tier genetics and you just gained more weight. What could happen is your body could eventually adapt to the new wieght and your VO2max could go back up. Or your body might reach genetic capacity and in order to gain VO2maxx you might need to lose weight.
VO2max isn't everything. It's nice to have a good VO2max, but it's not the only metric, it's not as important as good bloodwork.
Yeah I brought this up a while back, as I was confused with all the incessant VO2max threads.
Ignore VO2max scores from your Garmins, they are not accurate. A 5k time is better and lab test is best for $150-$200
Genetics… it’s pretty huge if your chasing a big number. Me my brother and sister all have huge engines (brother is pro endurance athlete, been to worlds many times in his sport), thanks mom & dad!
VO2 max goes up with either increasing O2 L / min, decreasing body weight, or combination of the two. So easiest way to raise VO2 max as expressed in L/min / kg is by loosing excess body weight. However if your ability to aerobically process O2 sucks you are just cheating the number.
I used to read PA’s blog 10 years ago when I was doing crazy endurance sports. Interesting to see how his perceptions and opinions have changed since then. He was all in on keto back then, think he even did an IM 140.6 on keto 🫣
I don't think a strong correlation between longevity and vo2 max should be interpreted as you need to always make sure to have the absolute highest vo2 max you possibly can.
If your vo2 max is 55 or higher you probably have no real reason to ever think about vo2 max again. Unless you actually want to place competitively and not just compete in endurance sport activities.
Is it even clear in this data that training your vo2 max increases lifespan? Just because long lived people tend to have higher vo2 max doesn't mean training it adds years to your life. It could just be a proxy for a genetically high functioning cardio respiratory system.
Grip strength is also correlated with longevity but that doesn't mean forearm curls are the path to immortality. Its just a proxy for total muscle mass. Its probably actually muscles in the legs and hips doing the long life-ing.
I'm not at all familiar with PA theories or the book, but this is the first time I've heard that muscle mass has a connection with longevity. Of course, maintaining muscle mass and strength is important, but it should not be done to such an extent that it significantly increases body weight(unless you are underweight).
Because you're making a pedantic point. The "paradox" has to do with the way VO2max is defined, not actual fitness. Putting on muscle mass doesn't diminish your aerobic fitness in any way. Most people would just tune out if someone launched into an explanation of the formula for VO2max, just for the sake addressing a rare edge case in which it doesn't 100% reflect your fitness level.
As an aside, if you were going for athletic performance and injury prevention, it would be an option to consider shedding a few more pounds, yes, through calorie restriction. Many top athletes aim for a lower BF% beyond yours, to start the season.
A good example is Giancarlo Stanton, who, after being plagued by lower body injuries for several seasons, came into spring training 30+ pounds lighter than usual (and he has always been extremely fit, so now he's well under 16% body fat). That of course means he shed both fat and muscle, in roughly equal proportion. Because that's just what happens when you lose weight. So far, he's having a good season, and is injury free.
>second only to muscle mass.
No, it's second only to STRENGTH. Now that's a distinction actually worth making, because muscle mass is a far poorer measure of strength, than VO2max is of aerobic fitness.
In the above example, Giancarlo Stanton hasn't lost a single mph on his exit velocity. NOTHING. He's just as strong as before, when he had \~20 pounds more muscle. Still hits the ball harder than anyone else in the known universe.
I think there is some evidence that "strengthless muscle mass" is actually a phenomena you only see in highly trained individual as its not just muscle fibers that do nothing or something like that. Its water. Muscles just eventually adapt to store more water.
For most people who aren't bodybuilders muscle mass is a pretty good proxy for strength and the guys putting on size without getting stronger are typically already very strong.
Strength and muscle mass are indeed related, despite giving examples of a few outliers.
Otherwise - there would be no weight class separation in Power-lifting, Boxing, Wrestling, Olympic weight-lifting….
And muscle mass alone is useful for protection from impact injuries such as the falls that all too often seriously injure and even kill frail and bony seniors. Of course strength and balance can prevent some of those injuries in the first place but when they do happen you’d rather have some meat armor on your bones. This isn’t to suggest you want to be huge at any point but, as we all know, you’re going to lose a lot of muscle as you age especially if for any reason you fall off with your training.
As others have said it’s a trade off not a paradox, You can also report vo2max in absolute terms, L/min, this is how rowing generally reports vo2max because their athletes are so large that their relative vo2max is small comparatively, but their absolute vo2max are sometimes 5.8 l/min but they weigh 200 lbs, to put this into comparison an elite cyclist weighing 146lbs like Tadaj Pogacar with a vo2max of 80 would have an absolute vo2max of 5.3l/min. Bottom line is, as long as you have a requisitely high vo2max you will get most of the benefits even if you gain some muscle which could dilute the relative value a bit
I don't think it's really a trade-off. When you dig into the reasons why a high vo2 max is beneficial, I don't know of any that are in any way compromised by packing on some muscle. Your arteries aren't stiffening and your heart isn't getting weaker. Like BMI, and basically any physiological measurement, it's imperfect, and is going to lead you astray in some corner cases if you're not looking at the bigger picture. I think this is essentially what you were getting at with the rest of your comment, but I think it's worth being clear about the fact that it's just an artifact of a metric that's not perfect--not an indication that something has actually been sacrificed by gaining muscle.
Maybe more blood flow is needed for bigger mass, dropping the rate of oxygen consumption since that is what vo2max is, just a stab at the dark, not a scientist.
This is literally it, more muscle / general mass needs more oxygen to function. A tiny stick with oversized lungs that starts floating as soon as he takes a deep breath is the ultimate VO2 max machine :p
If Tadaj jumped on the crossfit bandwagon and put on 40 lbs of muscle his vo2max would drop by about 25% all things equal. Is he less fit from a longevity perspective?
This is [Goodhart's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law) in action. V02 Max was a good approximation for health/exercise/fitness. For someone at a below average or average V02 Max, moving to above average is fairly un-controversially better for longevity. The difference between top 1% and top 5% is getting into esoteric territory. If you dropped from 1 to 5% b/c you become more sedentary it's probably slightly negative for longevity, but if you dropped b/c you packed on muscle it's very much unclear, and probably hard to provably study. It's certainly not clear enough that you can say that your muscle is "bad". A recent episode had a protein expert on that was theorizing that the descent into elder frailty is not linear, but rather a series of cliffs that you fall off of that lead to muscle and strength loss. Maintaining high protein intake during periods of recovery (like from a knee replacement) was the point, but also the more muscle you have the more room you have to lose muscle before you start hurting your quality of life or risking a deadly fall. TL;DR Don't worry about it, your 95th percentile V02 Max is fine (and if you're not measuring in a lab, you're probably guessing anyway)
>crossfit >put on 40 lbs of muscle Getting pretty outlandish with fantasy scenarios here.
Not too outlandish, Ryan Hall put on a bunch of muscle after he retired from marathon running and can deadlift 500lbs and run a sub 5min mile
Im just picking on crossfit. I'm saying your not going to add 40lbs of muscle with bad programming.
Yeah of course. CrossFit may have been a bad example
I don't believe so. As I said, when you look at \*why\* a high VO2 max is desirable, none of that is being compromised by adding muscle--or even fat, for that matter. You should be asking why it is that when calculating VO2 max, you divide by body weight. To my understanding, it's basically because it was developed as a metric to assess someone's ability to power the things they want to do with their body--and a larger, heavier body requires more energy to perform the same tasks. If you add weight without increasing the amount of oxygen your body can process and distribute, then you've almost certainly decreased, for example, your ability to run really long distances quickly. But your cardiovascular system is still just as capable of supplying all that oxygen and discarding all the waste--and that's almost certainly what's critical for longevity and basic health. Also, given that your mile time is coming down and your FTP is going up, I'm betting that if you look at your V02 max without normalizing for weight (just multiply your numbers by your weight at the time rather than looking at the percentiles), you'll find that you're now processing more oxygen than you were before. Or it's possible that you're primarily adding muscle in places that make your running and cycling more efficient/effective--or you're just improving your technique to use the energy more efficiently.
This. My understanding is that muscle mass does not decrease absolute VO2 max and if anything it likely increases it, but there is an expected trade-off for normalized (relative) VO2 max as muscle weight disproportionately increases relative to VO2 gains.
vo2max is by definition per unit of body weight
I know that it is most commonly used as a weight-normalized metric, but not sure it is by definition normalized? Would love for an expert to chime in as I would like to know.
And perhaps you are an expert, I am not throwing shade at you.
This is my response from above: VO2max can be reported as an absolute (L/min) or relative to body weight (ml/kg/min). So both are reported it doesn’t have to be weight normalized. But when normalizing to body weight it’s easier to compare individuals
VO2max can be reported as an absolute (L/min) or relative to body weight (ml/kg/min). So both are reported it doesn’t have to be weight normalized. But when normalizing to body weight it’s easier to compare individuals
As muscle mass goes up, times slows down so you live longer, vo2 max only appears to go down. You’ve created time dilation and solved the general theory of longevity, congratulations
Found Dave Asprey’s account
I live for these Reddit comments
People suggesting using Lean mass for the calc aren't making sense. To your point, vo2max would continue to drop as you packed on lean muscle. The obvious answer is the just use raw vo2 output rather than dividing by kgs. Your goal should be to increase your output as you continue training regardless of weight. This will make it harder to compare to others but from a personal progress perspective it's probably directionally better.
this is the way
Not an expert but have read a fair amount about v02max and imo it is overhyped, especially at the top end, and the old end. What I mean by that is if v02 is super low at any age then of course that is bad because it pretty much means you're either very inactive and/or struggling with major health problems. And at the old end, it really drops off a cliff as people break hips, have heart attacks etc. But I haven't seen any proof that having an extra high v02 in young or middle age equates to having a high one in old age, which is my same criticism with Attia telling everyone to build muscle and eat protein etc. You can have top 1% muscle mass and v02 at 50 and still have raging atherosclerosis that kills or permanently disables you at 51. Rather if we're going for a long health span (and hopefully lifespan), the main thing is to be active enough to have a not low v02 max, and avoid the heart disease/strokes/drugs as you get older that cause the v02 declines. If you do that for long enough you average v02 will eventually be top 1% as others your age decline. In other words, I think it's very possible that if you just have an average v02, but hang onto it for longer than most by eating healthy and gardening or whatever, I think that's probably the key. That's my hot take at least.
I've always found a major flaw with doctors and PHDs in these sort of fields is that it generally attracts high achieving people and high achieving people are suckers for a magic number they can better than others at.
Also suckers for "hard to get a man to understand something when his paycheck depends on not understanding it"
>drugs as you get older that cause the v02 declines Are you referring to metformin or like, coke?
Many prescribed drugs including metformin (even when taken correctly) can cause dizziness and other things that increase possibility falls/getting hurt from falls. I would also go so far as to say that is probably signficantly underreported/studied especially when people are taking multiple drugs. I'm not sure where coke falls on that spectrum though:)
What do falls have to do with VO2 max? Dizziness is a very uncommon side effect of metformin, and I think it’s safe to say the benefits for most people far outweigh the risks
When an elderly person breaks a hip or anything that causes disability v02 max and muscle mass decline very quickly. It's crazy how fast an elderly person can lose muscle when stuck in a bed. Dizziness comes up when you google common side effects of metformin, I don't know what the statistical significance is but that is just one of many commonly prescribed drugs and doesn't account for poly-pharmacy.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PeterAttia/s/FaIfqXX6xb
Agreed. Add knee replacements, pneumonia and/or any other chronic or semi-acute-chronic condition or disease to those strokes, heart attacks or broken hips and your hard-earned VO2 / muscle mass / strength / balance will also plummet.
Legit cannot figure out why you’re being downvoted for this People gonna lose their minds when they find out/Peter finally admits what getting Covid repeatedly does to the cardiovascular system (amongst others)
Yeah. Common in circlejerk subs where followers of a guru are irritated when faced with sobering facts and reality-checks. Heck, even elite athletes know how fast they’ll lose their edge, their strength and cardio/VO2 max fitness, when ill. And are scared sihtless of it. Imagine normal-Joes and Josephines > 50-60-70 yrs old, when set back with a few weeks or more in bed. Sure, they’ll be more ahead compared to their peers at first, but that delta will sadly quickly diminish or disappear at that age, with each passing day being sedentary - not lifting weights or doing 4 x 4 Norwegian VO2 Max workouts - due to an unforeseen (but very common) injury or illness, as they age.
The Ultimate Warrior, HHH, these are examples of people who had top tier muscle genetics, and extraorrdinary VO2max for their profession. HHH still had a heart attack. Ultimate Warrior died from heart failure. The steroid use may play a role, but even if it didn't, it's not so much how you were when you were young, but whether or not you can sustain that genetic potential.
And some cocaine probably did not help either.
Not all heart attacks are created equal- could have been cardiomyopathy or arrhythmia not necessarily an MI or other plaque related event
>Suddenly everyone is promoting vo2max as a leading longevity metric, second only to muscle mass. What? Vo2max is much more important than muscle mass, and this is not a new discovery, I'm not sure where you got the idea that muscle mass would be even near. Muscle mass actually seems to have a pretty low cap for benefits, studies often find no difference between 50% percentile and higher. Yeah, you are probably slightly overmuscled, if we only look at longevity markers. This won't make a meaningful difference and you probably enjoy being muscular for other reasons too, so no, you shouldn't lose it, but if the question is purely about what predicts living longer, ml of oxygen per kg per minute does, with no seeming cap, the very elite shows benefits. If a person is a muscle levels where they would have longevity benefits from adding muscle, they will generally be able to use more oxygen too when to do. A person who goes from not being able to climb stairs to being able to squatting with a weight will add muscle, but that muscle will use oxygen and improve vo2max too. In Attia's episode #294, Olav Bu explains they saw the same thing in the elites too: when his Olympian triathletes lost weight, their relative vo2max didn't actually go up! It's not a bad idea to use absolute vo2max (L/min) in tandem with relative (ml/kg/min) and it's not a perfect measurement, but this should be a caveat for muscle mass (don't add too much or you start losing your vo2max), not vo2max.
Sure, call it on par with muscle mass. Not for ASCVD but for the other pillars.
That would still be pretty far from what the data says. Not only is there no difference between groups above 50th percentile for all cause mortality, but even the most muscular to least muscular effect is substantially smaller than the cardiorespiratory fitness effect https://www.amjmed.com/article/s0002-9343(14)00138-7/fulltext for one example. Everybody should strength train and sarcopenia is very bad, but there's no reason to overstate the effect.
Peter says it’s a rate problem- and recommends to add as much muscle as you can before 50 because afterward gaining is hard and the muscle is longevity money in the bank that you will inevitably lose over time. Obviously within reason- I for one have a busy life and am not trying to be mr Olympia and not considering roids
Well, I think that's a reasonable strategy, even though there's actually little evidence for it. This study https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3337929/ for example found that being in the weakest 33% in middle age was bad for longevity, whether you were in the middle or the strongest third did not make a difference. Also, many studies show you can add muscle deep into your 70s and 80s, and maintaining muscle is not that hard, and going fully sedentary makes you lose it really fast - plenty of people who were gym rats in their 20s but it's all gone when they hit 50. But it's certainly better to do something early rather than show up at the gym when you are 60, so the guidance is not bad for most. Given how much stronger vo2max is at predicting longevity, including vo2max in midlife, it should probably be amended to "bank as much muscle as you can without disturbing your cardiorespiratory fitness progress".
I would put it differently, as in bank as many sustainable healthy habits as you can and do as much atherosclerosis prevention as you can, muscles aren't worth much if you can't supply them with blood. But that wouldn't sell much elk jerky:)
Look into VO2max normalized by fat-free mass rather than total-body mass.
Well, this is not a paradox. It's a trade-off. Trade-offs exist in all sorts of realms. Training for ultra-endurance tends to come at the expense of explosive power. Why is no one talking about this caveat?
Ultra endurance is not the same as vo2max though, so it'll depend. Looking at elite athletes, yeah, ultrarunners are making that tradeoff, and Kilian Jornet does not have a ton of explosive power. Cyclists are to a degree - yeah, Jonas Vingegaard or Tadej Pogacar will lose a flat sprint to a sprint specialist who is more focused on explosiveness, but they are still putting in incredible numbers in uphill accelerations. Cross-country skiers or triathletes, not that much really - Johannes Høsflot Klæbo or Kristian Blummenfelt will do pretty nicely on explosive power.
Yep, it’s not the same thing bc it’s a comparison. Illustrating the nature of a trade-off. Elite athletes will, of course, be elite outliers in more ways than one. That doesn’t negate the nature of trade-offs and diminishing returns.
Is this a troll post?
What about this suggests Troll post?
Not really a paradox. People with low muscle mass and low VO2max will die earlier.
This is not a caveat, it’s an optimization problem. Obviously if you only run and do not strength train, you put yourself at risk of frailty as you age. And, if you only focus on muscle mass but do not train your aerobic systems, you put yourself at risk of cardiac issues as you age. Just train both, and do your best to maximize each without sacrificing the other. If you want to tackle a strength challenge or train for a race, that is great, go for it - just know that you will lose some gains on the side you shifted your focus from. After the race, go back to a balanced lifestyle.
That’s all fair, but it’s a great target for most people because it means train to gain endurance, or cut fat to reduce the denominator. You are an edge case.
Weight has a lot to do with VO2max. But not just weight, also genetics. In your case you have top tier genetics and you just gained more weight. What could happen is your body could eventually adapt to the new wieght and your VO2max could go back up. Or your body might reach genetic capacity and in order to gain VO2maxx you might need to lose weight. VO2max isn't everything. It's nice to have a good VO2max, but it's not the only metric, it's not as important as good bloodwork.
maybe there is more than one path to longevity.
Yeah I brought this up a while back, as I was confused with all the incessant VO2max threads. Ignore VO2max scores from your Garmins, they are not accurate. A 5k time is better and lab test is best for $150-$200 Genetics… it’s pretty huge if your chasing a big number. Me my brother and sister all have huge engines (brother is pro endurance athlete, been to worlds many times in his sport), thanks mom & dad! VO2 max goes up with either increasing O2 L / min, decreasing body weight, or combination of the two. So easiest way to raise VO2 max as expressed in L/min / kg is by loosing excess body weight. However if your ability to aerobically process O2 sucks you are just cheating the number. I used to read PA’s blog 10 years ago when I was doing crazy endurance sports. Interesting to see how his perceptions and opinions have changed since then. He was all in on keto back then, think he even did an IM 140.6 on keto 🫣
I don't think a strong correlation between longevity and vo2 max should be interpreted as you need to always make sure to have the absolute highest vo2 max you possibly can. If your vo2 max is 55 or higher you probably have no real reason to ever think about vo2 max again. Unless you actually want to place competitively and not just compete in endurance sport activities. Is it even clear in this data that training your vo2 max increases lifespan? Just because long lived people tend to have higher vo2 max doesn't mean training it adds years to your life. It could just be a proxy for a genetically high functioning cardio respiratory system. Grip strength is also correlated with longevity but that doesn't mean forearm curls are the path to immortality. Its just a proxy for total muscle mass. Its probably actually muscles in the legs and hips doing the long life-ing.
I'm not at all familiar with PA theories or the book, but this is the first time I've heard that muscle mass has a connection with longevity. Of course, maintaining muscle mass and strength is important, but it should not be done to such an extent that it significantly increases body weight(unless you are underweight).
Because you're making a pedantic point. The "paradox" has to do with the way VO2max is defined, not actual fitness. Putting on muscle mass doesn't diminish your aerobic fitness in any way. Most people would just tune out if someone launched into an explanation of the formula for VO2max, just for the sake addressing a rare edge case in which it doesn't 100% reflect your fitness level. As an aside, if you were going for athletic performance and injury prevention, it would be an option to consider shedding a few more pounds, yes, through calorie restriction. Many top athletes aim for a lower BF% beyond yours, to start the season. A good example is Giancarlo Stanton, who, after being plagued by lower body injuries for several seasons, came into spring training 30+ pounds lighter than usual (and he has always been extremely fit, so now he's well under 16% body fat). That of course means he shed both fat and muscle, in roughly equal proportion. Because that's just what happens when you lose weight. So far, he's having a good season, and is injury free. >second only to muscle mass. No, it's second only to STRENGTH. Now that's a distinction actually worth making, because muscle mass is a far poorer measure of strength, than VO2max is of aerobic fitness. In the above example, Giancarlo Stanton hasn't lost a single mph on his exit velocity. NOTHING. He's just as strong as before, when he had \~20 pounds more muscle. Still hits the ball harder than anyone else in the known universe.
I think there is some evidence that "strengthless muscle mass" is actually a phenomena you only see in highly trained individual as its not just muscle fibers that do nothing or something like that. Its water. Muscles just eventually adapt to store more water. For most people who aren't bodybuilders muscle mass is a pretty good proxy for strength and the guys putting on size without getting stronger are typically already very strong.
Strength and muscle mass are indeed related, despite giving examples of a few outliers. Otherwise - there would be no weight class separation in Power-lifting, Boxing, Wrestling, Olympic weight-lifting….
And muscle mass alone is useful for protection from impact injuries such as the falls that all too often seriously injure and even kill frail and bony seniors. Of course strength and balance can prevent some of those injuries in the first place but when they do happen you’d rather have some meat armor on your bones. This isn’t to suggest you want to be huge at any point but, as we all know, you’re going to lose a lot of muscle as you age especially if for any reason you fall off with your training.