Although you may be a fitness enthusiast, I bet you didn't know anything till now about VO2 Max. If that is so, please read on. It will surely help you to gain some important insights into how fitness works for you. You see, when you exercise, two things happen simultaneously to better rejuvenate your body's tissues.
One is that the amount of oxygen that reaches your tissues per minute increases significantly for the entire duration of an exercise session. The other thing that occurs is that the blood flow velocity through your circulation system increases significantly during the period that you undertake a specific exercise. The respective values of both parameters increase in comparison to their respective pre-exercise values.
The increased values of the two parameters mentioned above together go to reach more oxygen per minute to the unit weight of the body's tissues. And this last parameter is nothing else but what is termed as VO2. When you maximize VO2, you straightaway maximize your fitness. The relationship between Vo2 and fitness is so simple.
Three factors are utilized to maximize your fitness by maximizing your VO2. These factors include the capacity of your lungs to fill them with the maximum oxygen possible during each intake of breath. They also include your heart's capacity to pump blood at a faster rate to the tissues and muscles in your body. The last of these factors is the efficiency of your tissues and muscles in extracting and utilizing the oxygen.
VO2 is measured in terms of the milliliters of oxygen per minute of exercise that reaches per kilogram of body weight. In short its units are ml per min per kg or ml per kg per minute. Normally, endurance athletes such as long distance runners use this parameter to define their fitness levels. However, it can be used by anyone as a useful indicator to maximize their fitness.
If you have a high amount of VO2 during exercise, it means that more oxygen is reaching your muscles and tissues per minute of the exercise. You will find that the VO2 levels of elite long distance athletes who train in rarefied air conditions as a routine and establish record timings in their races in such tough environmental conditions, usually maintain the highest levels of fitness.
An example is of Kenyan long distance runners who train in the high altitudes that obtain in the hilly terrain in Kenya. When such athletes set records in such tough environmental conditions, it becomes far easier for them to win long distance races in other countries in the plains where the oxygen content is significantly richer.
From the above parameters, you can get an idea of how various different factors can affect the fitness level of a person. If you have lung disease, naturally, your lungs will not be able to inflate to the maximum extent during exercise and so reduced amount of oxygen will reach the tissues and muscles. Ditto is for people who smoke cigarettes.
If a person has heart disease, definitely it reduces the blood flow velocity through his/her circulation system. If an obese person's arteries and veins are choked with cholesterol and lipids, it also reduces the blood flow velocity and therefore reaches lesser oxygen to the tissues and muscles. With age too the ability of your body's system to carry oxygen to the tissues also declines considerably.
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