VO2 Max Estimate Calculator

What Is VO2 Max?

VO2 max (maximal oxygen uptake) is the maximum rate at which your body can consume oxygen during intense exercise. It is measured in milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute (mL/kg/min) and is considered the gold standard measure of cardiorespiratory fitness.

Higher VO2 max values mean your heart, lungs, and muscles can work harder and more efficiently.
Elite endurance athletes often have VO2 max values above 70 mL/kg/min.
An untrained adult usually lands in the Fair or Poor columns of the tables below.

The heart rate ratio method

This calculator uses the heart rate ratio method of Uth, Sørensen, Overgaard and Pedersen (2004), which estimates VO2 max from the ratio of maximum heart rate to resting heart rate:

VO2 max ≈ 15.3 × (HRmax ÷ HRrest)

Where:

• HRmax = Maximum heart rate, measured if you know it
• HRrest = Resting heart rate, measured in the morning before getting up

The factor of 15.3 came from 46 well-trained men aged 21 to 51, and the study measured their maximum heart rate directly. With an age-predicted maximum instead, the typical error grew to about 4.7 mL/kg/min, around 8%. The authors said other groups (women, older adults, untrained people) would need validating separately, so for them the size of the error is simply unknown. It is not known to run high or low.

Most people have not done a maximal test, so this page offers two estimates of the maximum. Tanaka (208 − 0.7 × age) is the default because the older 220 − age formula overestimates young adults and underestimates older ones by up to 10 beats, and a 10-beat error here moves the answer by two or three points.

A warning about precision: the ratio is a division, so a small error in the denominator matters more than it looks. Getting your resting pulse wrong by 5 bpm shifts the result by 3 to 4 points at a resting rate in the 60s, more below that, which is most of a fitness class. Measure it lying down before you sit up, on three separate mornings, and take the average.

VO2 Max Fitness Ratings

The Cooper Institute norms, which depend on age as much as on sex. These are the same figures the VO2 Max Calculator uses, so the two pages will always agree about what a given number means.

Men:

Women:

Notice how far the bands slide. A man at 40 mL/kg/min is Fair at 25 and Excellent at 65. A single “adult” table would have to pick one of those and be wrong about the other, which is why this one does not.

How to Measure Resting Heart Rate

Take your pulse first thing in the morning, before getting out of bed.
Count beats for a full 60 seconds. Counting for 15 and multiplying by 4 quadruples your counting error too.
For best accuracy, measure on 3 consecutive mornings and average the results.
The usual adult range is 60 to 100 bpm, and trained endurance athletes often sit well below 60.

Improving Your VO2 Max

Intervals tend to raise VO2 max a little more than the same weeks of steady training (a 2015 meta-analysis by Milanović and colleagues found both work), but the steady hours build the base the intervals sit on.

How much any one person gains varies more than most plans admit. In the HERITAGE Family Study, 20 weeks of supervised cycling raised VO2 max by about 400 mL/min on average, and individual gains ran from almost nothing to about a litre a minute.