Wednesday 24 June 2020

Rise From Decline - VO2max And Aging Explained

If you are over a certain age, even as young as say 40, and you consult the runes about your future then it looks like a grim tale of inexorable decline.

You are past your peak. Everything desirable, strength, fitness, looks is on a downward trend. The only aspects that will increase are the things are the unwanted, fat, waistline and wrinkles.

This is deemed a universal truth for lots of things but the one I will focus on for the remainder of this article is VO2Max, the endurance athlete's holy grail. This has the virtue of being easy to measure, extremely important (to a cyclist at least) and with lots of available data.

The evidence for our inevitable decline seems overwhelming
  • There's the science. The most frequently seen statistic about how VO2max changes with age is that "In the general population, VO2max tends to decline by about 10% per decade after the age of 30. Athletes who continue to compete and train hard can reduce the drop by about half, to 5% per decade after the age of 30." So even after 30 it's bad news. All athetes can do is hope to stem the tide.
  • There's the decline of heroes. Sports stars are young and getting younger, even the greatest have to call it a day after once they have put their two score years behind them.
  • There's the advice in training articles, magazines and from some coaches that you need to rest more and cannot handle as much volume and/or intensity.
  • There's the testimony of old cyclists. They will almost always tell you how much fitter and faster they were when they were younger, if only you had seen them then.
  • There's common sense. It's just obvious that a 25 year old will be fitter and have a much higher VO2max than someone 50 years older.

Whilst seemingly convincing all the above is in fact misleading. It is not just misleading but actually harmful, since it risks creating a self fulfilling prophecy that will make people, give up training, train easier or just not train at all because they think it is pointless. And taking these courses of inaction will risks damage to both long term health and well being.

That is not of course to say that everyone has to train like an Olympic hopeful. They don't, that is their choice. But this choice should not be predjudiced by misunderstood opinion masquarading as scientific fact.

The critical point that needs to be taken into account is to differentiate peak potential VO2max from real actual living, breathing VO2max.

These two values can be, indeed almost always are, very very different.

Most of the received wisdom above deals very much with the former "Peak VO2max". Whilst we as real people care about the latter "Actual VO2max".

To illustrate the difference imagine two identical twins. They rolled double six when they were born and have the genetic potential to have a "Peak VO2max" of 100.

But they were separated at birth. One, let's call them "Max" was adopted by a family of cyclists. The other, let's call them "Min", went to another family, who loved them very much but had never been attracted by the prospect of exercise.

"Max's" parents saw their potential from an early stage. As soon as possible they were cycling. They started winning almost immediately and while in their teens did tests which showed their potential to their national cycling talent team. They were fast tracked onto a development program targeting the next Olympics but one, The next 8 years were spent dedicated to cyling and they had every resource that money could buy to assist them. It all worked wonders. They struck Olympic gold.

What was Max's VO2max at their peak? It would be incredibly high. But not 100. Maybe if Max could be cloned enough lessons could be learned to hit 100% of potential. But even that is unlikely. It would take many attempts and a fair degree of luck for that to happen.

But still Max's VO2max would be extremely high. And for Max, it would almost certainly be as high as it would ever be. Maybe they could sustain it at that level for another Olympic cycle, maybe even a third or more. But at some point it would, as the warnings above gloomily predict go down, year on year, decade on decade, no matter hard Max trained.

We will leave Max there except for one final thought. How may they react, when their Olympic career is over and there are no more gold medals to chase. They may continue to train with the same intensity and dedication. But they may not. If the latter what value would there be in measuring their VO2max? All it would tell us is the oldest training adage of all "use it or lose it".

Now let's look at Min. They never exercised much as a child, teenager or young adult. They found a good job but it required a long commute every day and lot's of overseas travel. The upside was that the expense account was very generous so they could eat and drink as they liked. We cannot know Min's VO2max at this stage but we can say it was very unlikely to be close to 100 at the time Max was winning the first of many Olympic golds despite them being identical in age.

In their mid 40s Min had a fitness checkup and was told they were way overweight and needed to do something about it. So they got a bike and started commuting via train instead of car and so spent an hour a day exercising. The weight started to come down and Min started enjoying the bike portion of the commute for its own sake. So they got a "real" bike and joined a local club. At first they were dropped on every hill but each time by a bit less. Then Min started to keep up, then started to lead. Min enjoyed riding but never had the time to take it seriously until retirement. Then Min took up training with every bit of enthusiasm and focus as their twin had several decades earlier.

What is likely to be Min's VO2max after several years of hard work?

It will be less than 100 and less than Max's peak.

But it will be more compared to what it was at 40. Very likely much more

Will it go up or down from this point?

It's impossible to say with certainty. However given it took Max many years to reach peak and it stayed at that point for many years more it is hard to see why Min should not find the same, albeit later and albeit not reaching the same absolute values.


So revisiting the evidence for inevitable decline cited earlier.
  • Science – may be right for Max but not for Min. That is because life is complicated and isolating one variable, aging, and assessing its impact on another, VO2max is extremely difficult to do. It is only possible by making assumptions and the key one here is that the rate of decline, or any decline at all rather than increase, depends on individuals not changing their way of life.
  • The decline of sporting heroes – heroes may be role models but the are, by definition, not the same as the rest of us. You can only infer anything from them if you actually happen to be lucky enough to actually live like them. Most of us do not have the luxery of spending unlimited time and resources pursuing the sport that we love while at our natural peak. That does not mean that we cannot reach our own, slightly lower, peaks much later on in life.
  • Rest more train less. Just wrong. This ignores the cardinal rule of coaching which is to understand and adapt a training plan to the individual not the other way round. Yes Min could probably not follow, at 50, the most extreme training blocks that Max did at 25 But Min would be able to train much harder and require less recovery than someone half their age but at the other end of the luck scale when being given the gift of raw talent.
  • Old cyclists tales: Best taken with a pinch of salt. But press them and you may find that, strangely, once they started losing more than winning they did less training as they stopped seeing the point and that it is this change in motivation rather than any physical reason that is the key factor in the rate of their decline in fitness.
  • Common sense. Illustrates the difference between something being true and something being useful. If you live in the UK and get told in April that it will be hotter in July that is almost certainly true. But it is useless information if you want to know what to wear tomorrow. For fitness planning, indeed almost any planning, the only important timescales are what happens over the next months and, unless you are an Olympic hopeful, year, two at the most. Over this timescale, if you are more line Min than Max (as are the vast majority) what happens to your fitness depends most of all on what you do, not how many seconds tick by on the clock while you are doing it.

What can be said in summary?
  • Most abilities are a combination of potential and what is actually achieved.
  • It is rare that any ability is mastered to the full extent of its potential. Doing so requires a lot of time, motivation, resources and luck.
  • It is true that for most abilties our potential varies over the course of a lifetime, building towards maturity, reaching a peak which will then plateau for a number of years and then slowly fade.
  • However this in no way implies that our actual ability must match and track this curve. The only time this may be expected to happen is for lifelong professionals or others who have the time and resources to dedicate themselves to their craft.
  • For those other than professionals there is likely to be a gap between potential (even when reduced by the passage of time) and actual ability.
  • If it exists this gap can be closed, regardless of age, through focused, purposeful training.
  • If the gap is sufficiently large closing this gap may take many years so improvements can be expected in actual ability throughout this time.
  • Bad luck, injury and illness may, of course, interfere with closing this gap or even make it bigger. However taking actions that improve abilities rather than allowing them to decline will reduce the chance of these occurring.

In a nutshell.

While potential is certainly affected by the chance of genetics and the passage of time it is rare that anybody apart from the very gifted and lucky few actually improve themselves to the limit of what is possible to achieve.

For the rest, the vast majority, there is every reason to be optimistic and not assume that getting older inevitably means getting worse. To the contrary, even taking into account a theoretical reduction in maximum potential there is every reason why a well motivated individual can increase their actual abilities for many decades.

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