What is a good VO2 max for a man by age? The bands from 15 to 74

A good VO2 max for a man is set almost entirely by his age, and the clearest men-only reference chart comes from 2,837 treadmill tests on healthy, physically active Brazilians aged 15 to 74 [14]. The researchers took the average score for each age group and built five bands around it - very low, low, fair, good and excellent - with good meaning within 5% of the average for men that age [14].

Each line below gives the four cut-offs that separate those five bands, in millilitres of oxygen per kilogram of body weight each minute [14]:

• aged 15-24: 25.3, 40.5, 48.1 and 53.1
• aged 25-34: 23.7, 37.9, 45.0 and 49.8
• aged 35-44: 22.7, 36.3, 43.1 and 47.7
• aged 45-54: 20.3, 32.4, 38.5 and 42.5
• aged 55-64: 17.5, 28.2, 33.5 and 37.1
• aged 65-74: 15.0, 24.0, 28.5 and 31.5

Read a line from the left: below the first number is very low, between the first and second is low, between the second and third is fair, between the third and fourth is good, and above the fourth is excellent [14]. A 47-year-old man reading 39 sits in the good band, just over its floor of 38.5, while the same 39 at age 30 would be low [14].

The whole scale slides down with age. The floor of the good band falls from 48.1 for men aged 15 to 24 to 28.5 for men aged 65 to 74, a drop of about 40% across fifty years, or roughly four points a decade [14].

Training moves a man further than a decade of ageing does. Among 30 athletes and 120 non-athletes aged 17 to 25 tested in the same laboratory, the male athletes averaged 52.4 on the treadmill and the male non-athletes 33.4 [3]. Most of the athletes landed between about 44 and 61, most of the non-athletes between about 30 and 37 [3].

If your figure came off a watch, treat it as an estimate. Thirty adults wore an Apple Watch for five to ten days and then took a laboratory treadmill test: the watch read about 6 points lower than the laboratory on average, and for one person it could sit 6 points above or 18 points below the measured value [6]. The typical error was around 13% of the true figure, and the authors concluded the estimates need refining before they could be used in clinical care [6].

VO2 max measures a ceiling. It is the highest rate at which your lungs, blood, heart and working muscles can move oxygen together during an all-out effort, so the weakest link in that chain sets the number. It is reported per kilogram of body weight, which is why putting on weight lowers the score even when nothing inside the chest has changed.

That ceiling is why cardiologists pay attention to it. A review of its clinical uses found VO2 max to be an independent predictor of outcomes in heart failure and in coronary artery disease, the narrowing of the arteries that feed the heart, and useful for identifying patients who need more aggressive treatment [4]. The same review notes it is still underused in routine cardiac care, because the test needs specialist equipment and staff [4].

How far the number moves depends on how hard the training is. Six months of supervised cycling raised VO2 max by 20% in adults aged 35 to 65 [10]. Across 28 trials covering 1,620 adults with overweight and obesity, interval training - short bursts of hard effort separated by easier recovery - produced the largest gain of any exercise type, roughly 7 points, ahead of steady aerobic work and resistance training with weights [7]. Pooling 10 trials in 273 patients whose heart and metabolic conditions were driven mainly by lifestyle, interval training beat moderate continuous exercise by about 3 points, a 9% edge [5].

Effort has to pass a threshold before the ceiling itself lifts. Twelve weeks of low-intensity training in healthy people over 60 improved how their bodies coped with moderate effort but left VO2 max unchanged, though that was a group of only 13 [15]. In adults over 50, pooled aerobic and resistance programmes shifted it by about 3.6 points [9].

The chart describes the people it was built from: healthy, physically active Brazilians tested on a treadmill. Reference values travel badly between populations. Prediction equations built mainly on Caucasian samples overestimated the real values of 95 sedentary Chinese adults aged 20 to 70, and those authors concluded fitness should be judged against local standards rather than one global chart [1].

The machine changes the answer too. In the athlete study, the same male athletes averaged 52.4 on a treadmill and 45.2 on a cycle ergometer, a stationary bike that measures the work you produce [3]. A cycle score and a treadmill score are not interchangeable, and these bands were built on treadmill tests [14].

The five labels are descriptive, not health thresholds. Nothing in this chart says what happens to a man who moves from fair to good, and none of these papers reports how much the same man's score varies between two tests, so a small change on a retest may be measurement noise rather than fitness.

Who these numbers do not describe:

• men under 15 or over 74, the outer edges of the sample [14]
• men with advanced heart disease. In 38 recipients of a left ventricular assist device, a mechanical pump implanted to help a failing heart, the average peak oxygen figure was 12.4, and 15 of them scored below half of what would be predicted for their age and size [2]
• anyone reading the estimate off a wrist wearable rather than a laboratory test, given the roughly 6-point average underestimate [6]

Field tests are only lightly validated as a substitute. A 2-minute walk test predicted VO2 max reasonably well in 32 older adults with cognitive frailty, but that was a small and specific group, and the authors said it needs testing in a larger population [13].

Say a 47-year-old man has a treadmill test come back at 39. His age band is 45 to 54, where fair runs up to 38.5 and good runs from 38.5 to 42.5, so he has just cleared the good band and sits below the 42.5 line for excellent [14]. If that 39 had come from his watch instead of a laboratory, the honest reading is a range rather than a point, because watch estimates ran about 6 points low on average and drifted much further in individuals [6]. A retest a year later showing 41 would be a real move in the right direction but a modest one, roughly the size of the average gain seen after pooled aerobic and resistance training in adults over 50 [9], and well short of the 20% that six months of structured cycling produced in adults aged 35 to 65 [10].