Dr. Anne Friedlander talks about exercise capacity & all cause mortality and the golden standard for cardiovascular fitness – VO2Max and how it’s related to aging in this short clip
Foreign so first we’ll talk about maximal oxygen consumption or vo2 max so the maximum amount of oxygen your body can consume and this is considered the gold standard for cardiovascular fitness so the reason it is is it takes into account all these different elements so ventilation moving air in and out of your lungs diffusion getting oxygen into your blood
Saturation cardiac output so how much blood is moving around your body the blood flow down to the tissues and then your tissues extracting that oxygen to use to power your metabolism and vo2 is proportional to work so the higher your vo2 max the more physical work you can do so in order to optimize your vo2 max you need to optimize all of these different components
So here is a figure looking at endurance trained women and sedentary women across the lifespan so this is a cross-sectional study and over here you have vo2 max on this axis and then age down here and so the first thing you probably notice is that the curves decline over time so vo2 max falls over time and if you watched your homework videos you’d know exactly
Why that is um but so age is an important component with vo2 max but you also see that there’s a lot of variability here at every age so this seven-year-old here has a vo2 max that that’s higher than this 25 year old here right so there’s a lot of variability you may also notice that this line drops a little bit faster so the endurance train line drops faster
Than the sedentary line so there’s a convergence of those lines and so what’s happening up here is that you’re not only getting the physiologic changes but you’re also getting a full in the ability to train as hard so for those of us who are getting older you know that it’s just harder to put in the hours that the injuries last longer you need more recovery
Time and so training volume and intensity can go down and so there’s a little bit of detraining added into the physiologic changes here so who will notice the fall first well this group up here is exercising regularly and they’re noticing that they are not they can’t do as much as they used to right so they’re noticing that their physiology is changing they’re
Pretty bummed about it i have to say but down here these people are just sort of going about their daily lives not realizing that their capacity is actually falling and that’s significant because there’s this threshold of disability and below that it’s very hard for people to take care of themselves to carry their groceries to go upstairs and so there’s a loss
Of independence that happens down here and you can see that in the sedentary group that happens to a number of people in their 60s but none of the endurance trained people have crossed over that threshold of disability so even there there is a fall in aerobic capacity it still remains above that threshold of disability when they’re training throughout their life
And that is where you want to ultimately end up and it’s not just function it’s also all-cause mortality or health so death from any cause and here’s one of many studies that shows this relationship between exercise capacity and all-cause mortality so this was done at the palo alto va here with um over 6 000 vets and they measured the capacity of the vets on the
Treadmill and they divided them up into quintiles of exercise capacity so up here is the fittest group and down here is the least fit group and you have normal subjects and subjects that already have cardiovascular disease and so this is relative risk of death over here compared to the most fit group and you can see that there’s sort of this exponential curve
Going down so that by the time you get to the least fit group oops lease fit group they are four to four and a half times more likely to die of any cause in the seven year follow-up than the group that was most fit so there’s this well-established relationship between fitness and all-cause mortality you see a similar relationship with muscle strength as you do
With cardiovascular fitness and that is if you do not do any resistance training you are less strong to begin with and you fall more rapidly and you end up at this critical range if you train regularly throughout your life you will start stronger and in this case the fall is less steep and you end up having a great deal of functional capacity in your later years
And this is just sort of a summary of literature data it’s not from one particularly particular study it’s representative foreign
Transcribed from video
Exercise Capacity & All Cause Mortality, Vo2Max & Muscle With Age By Reverse Aging Revolution