How To Measure and Improve Your Cardiovascular Health
I hate going to hospitals and doctors.
Maybe its because being around sick people is a reminder of my own mortality.
Or maybe its the hospital smells or the bad food. A lot of guys I know feel the same. Hell, most guys I know can’t even remember the last time they saw their doctor (and yet manage to maintain their cars better than their bodies).
I get it. Hospitals and doctors concentrate on disease. And none of us want to hear bad news. Plus doctors are surprisingly bad at reading lab results.
Most of us would prefer to invest our time on being healthy and strong.
A recent large study found thatnot exercising may be more harmful to your health than smoking.
A key piece of the exercise puzzle is having healthy heart and lungs. Especially since cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of preventable death (i.e. something under your control).
Here is an easy way to measure and improve your cardiovascular performance, prevent disease, and live longer:
How Do You Benefit?
A legitimate question is “Why should we try to develop more performance capacity when we are already quite able to carry out our daily responsibilities (in the office, , at home, or when traveling)?” In addition to feeling good, looking great, and living longer, here are five additional ways you benefit:
- Our “normal” performance capacity, is kept at a baseline average only by our customary daily activities. Any additional stress will severely tax our reserves.
- Whatever we do is less fatiguing if we are in generally good physical condition.
- We have greater resistance against various types of illness.
- If illness should come, the body can put up a better fight against it, and speed the process of recovery.
- Last but not least, life becomes more enjoyable when we are in good physical condition.
Your Cardiovascular Performance
What is cardiovascular performance?
Cardiovascular health, cardiopulmonary capacity, aerobic fitness, or ‘cardio’ are essentially synonymous.
In simple terms, this aspect of human physiology reflects oxygen usage by your heart and lungs during exercise.
In the average person with no lung disease, no matter how hard you are exercising, the lungs are not the rate-limiting step in getting oxygen delivered to the tissues (Hsia CCW, et al. 1998) (Sutton JR, 1992). Your heart has the most dramatic effect on oxygen delivery performance.
Aging and lack of aerobic exercise are the main reasons why your heart (and lungs) perform worse at delivering oxygen efficiently.
The measurement of this performance capacity is known as “VO2max“.
How To Measure Yourself
Several different running tests can be used to estimate your aerobic performance or capacity (also known as VO2max).
Cooper 1.5-mile Running Test
This V02 Max test is listed in ACSM’s Complete Guide to Fitness & Health, 2011, p. 29–30:
- Run exactly 1.5 miles on a level surface as hard as you can.
- You do not need to record your heart rate for this test.
2. Time your run as precisely as you can; do not round-off; convert seconds into a decimal.
- For example, if your time is 11 minutes and 20 seconds, your time would be “11.3 minutes”.
3. Your Estimated VO2max = (483 divided by elapsed time in minutes) + 3.5
Instead of running for distance, you can also run for time (12 minutes) using this calculator.
Since you are busy, I “did the math” for you, so you can gauge your V02 max directly from your 1.5 mile run-time:
Alternative Measures
Not everyone can run 1.5 miles due to ankle/knee/hip issues. Here are some alternative methods to test your V02 Max:
- Treadmill test
- Use this calculator.
- IMPORTANT: You must multiply the results of this calculator by 3.5 to convert from METs to ml/kg/min, the standardized unit of V02 Max.
2. Rower test
- Requires a Concept 2 Rowing Machine
- Use this calculator.
3. Rockport walking test
- Use this calculator.
How Do You Compare To Others?
Now that you’ve got your value, how do you rank compared to your peers?
The tables below represent data obtained at the Cooper Fitness Institute in Dallas and can be found in ACSM’s book Complete Guide to Fitness & Health:
Why Your Aerobic Capacity Is Important
Your aerobic capacity is arguably the most important fitness parameter of all.
Dr. Steven Blair, a professor at the University of South Carolina and a leading researcher on the relationship of aerobic fitness to health, states that:
- “Low cardiorespiratory fitness is a greater risk factor for cardiovascular mortality than any of the more traditional risk factors that our medical profession typically focuses on”.
- eg., obesity, hypertension, diabetes, high cholesterol, or smoking.
The following graph is from Dr. Blair’s paper published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine (Blair SN. 2009). It summarizes data from more than 53,000 patients evaluated at the Cooper Clinic in Dallas. These patients were followed for an average of 16 years. Then, researchers evaluated their pre-existing health risks and the cause of death in those who died.
They found that health conditions such as diabetes, high cholesterol levels, and obesity were surprisingly minor explanations for deaths.
Instead, the #1 most influential factor was a person’s aerobic fitness level, designated in the graph below as “CRF”: cardiorespiratory fitness:
Can You Improve Your Aerobic Capacity?
Research (Scribbans 2016) shows improvements in VO2Max can be achieved by:
- Shorter training doses at higher intensities (i.e. interval training)
- Longer training doses of lower intensity (i.e. steady-state cardio)
Both the tried and proven “steady-state” training (i.e. jogging), as well as an intense, fast-paced resistance training, have the potential of increasing one’s VO2max significantly. Higher intensities of exercise are more effective for improving VO2max than lower intensities of exercise, when equated for volume (Gormley 2008). This means that HIIT versus cardio is the more time-efficient exercise modality to increase your fitness (Helgerud 2007),
A study performed in the 60’s reveals how fast your aerobic capacity can decline when you fail to do aerobic exercise on a regular basis:
- Five healthy men in their 20’s were put to bed for 3 weeks.
- Their VO2max decreased during this period from 43 to 31 ml/kg/min.
- Then, after 2 months of training (walking, jogging), a repeat VO2max of 51 ml/kg/min was determined.
- Thirty years later, when these same men were 50 years old, their VO2max value was again down to 31 ml/kg/min (Saltin B. 2002).
The conclusion is that 3 weeks of sedentary behavior can cause the same reduction in aerobic fitness as does 30 years of aging!
Thus, while you can’t do anything about aging, you can certainly can keep your heart and lungs fit and healthy.
Here’s how you can do it.
How Do You Complete The Puzzle?
There are two other important puzzle pieces to well-rounded health, preventing disease, and living longer:
- Strength, in particular lean body mass.
- Lean muscle mass is the #1 predictor of longevity
- Nutrition, in particular achieving a healthy weight.
- “You are what you eat”
- Eat junk = feel like crap.
- Eat healthy = feel healthy.
Are you ready to take the next step?
Originally published at thehealthyexec.com on November 1, 2018.
Jeff Popoff
I am a leading online health & fitness coach to top executives, entrepreneurs, and business owners around the world. https://thehealthyexec.com