iron eyes for the normal guy

P's VO2max test

When I started exercising 4 years ago after many years of sitting on my a** and fourteen years of smoking cigarettes (DON'T try this at home!), I knew I was making a healthy desicion. What I was unsure of, though, is whether or not my not-too-healthy lifestyle had left me with the aerobic capacity of a sewer rat.

Recently, my triathlon coach got some cool new equipment to measure metabolic info including aerobic capacity (VO2max) and other neat things like resting metabolic rate. Being a numbers geek, I decided to be a guinea pig for the VO2max test, which involved me pedaling my bike on a computrainer hooked up to a heartrate monitor and a breathing tube. I started off at a low resistance, and the wattage would be increased every 15 seconds until I reached a hard effort, at which time I had to sprint all-out for 30 seconds. All this equipment was hooked up to a computer which plotted different charts explaining heartrate, fat burning, carb burning, and finally AT and VO2max. AT (point at which your body can no longer intake enough oxygen to supply the muscles) is a number that influences what heartrate I should be training in - turns out on the bike mine is 158 beats per minute. The number I got for VO2max was 70.8 which is supposedly high for a woman of my age - so I guess I was happy to find out that I could take in more oxygen pipe-dwelling rodent. I must say that during the test I was making an effort to breathe like they teach in Bikram yoga (to expel all the "toxins" by fully exhaling before taking in fresh oxygen) - I think that has helped me in general since I started doing it while cycling, running, swimming etc.

Overall, the test was quite helpful and I feel it's motivated me to train diligently now that I realize I have physiological potential in endurance sports.

posted by supersonique @ 10:18 AM