What is a good VO2 max by age? Ranges for men and women

A good VO2 max is a score close to the average for your own age and sex. For people who exercise regularly that means 43.1 to 47.7 for men aged 35-44 and 33.2 to 36.6 for women the same age [1][20]. Both bands fall with age, by about 4 points a decade for the men and about 3 for the women [1].

What counts as good, by age band, for people who exercise regularly. Both columns apply one published rule: 95 to 105% of the average for that age and sex [20][1]:

• aged 15-24 - 48.1 to 53.1 for men, 37.0 to 40.8 for women
• aged 25-34 - 45.0 to 49.8 for men, 36.2 to 40.0 for women
• aged 35-44 - 43.1 to 47.7 for men, 33.2 to 36.6 for women
• aged 45-54 - 38.5 to 42.5 for men, 29.5 to 32.7 for women
• aged 55-64 - 33.5 to 37.1 for men, 27.2 to 30.0 for women
• aged 65-74 - 28.5 to 31.5 for men, 23.8 to 26.4 for women

Landing below your range is not automatically a problem. The same classification calls 80 to 95% of your group average fair, 50 to 80% low and under half very low, while anything above the range is excellent [20].

What counts as a good VO2 max for a man can be read straight off the classification's own cut-offs, with no arithmetic. Each line gives the four cut-offs for men of that age, in millilitres of oxygen per kilogram of bodyweight per minute [20]:

• 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 [20]. A man of 47 whose test reads 39 is in the good band, just above its floor of 38.5, while the same 39 at 30 would be only fair [20]. The floor of the good band for men falls from 48.1 at 15-24 to 28.5 at 65-74 [20].

Those bands sit on averages measured in 3,992 healthy adults in Brazil, each walked to exhaustion on a treadmill while a mask measured the oxygen they used [1]. Athletes, smokers, people with obesity and anyone on daily medication were excluded, so this is a healthy reference group rather than a picture of the general population.

The average VO2 max by age, first for people who exercise regularly and then for people who are sedentary, meaning they do not exercise regularly [1]:

• aged 15-24 - 50.6 for men and 38.9 for women; 47.4 and 35.6 if sedentary
• aged 25-34 - 47.4 and 38.1; 41.9 and 34.0 if sedentary
• aged 35-44 - 45.4 and 34.9; 39.0 and 30.0 if sedentary
• aged 45-54 - 40.5 and 31.1; 35.6 and 27.2 if sedentary
• aged 55-64 - 35.3 and 28.6; 30.0 and 23.9 if sedentary
• aged 65-74 - 30.0 and 25.1; 23.1 and 21.2 if sedentary

Active people sat about 3 to 7 points above sedentary people of the same age and sex [1].

The bands are ten years wide because that is how the testing was reported, so a man of 43 reads the 35-44 row and a man of 45 the row below it [1]. People inside each group were also spread widely: roughly two-thirds of sedentary men aged 45-54 landed between about 28 and 43 [1]. A point or two either side of a figure is noise.

Women averaged below men in every band, which is why a mixed-sex chart misleads. The gap was close to 12 points at 15-24 and under 5 by 65-74 [1].

Fitness does track survival across populations. An overview of 199 cohort studies covering 20.9 million observations found the fittest people were about half as likely to die during follow-up as the least fit [11]. That is a comparison between groups rather than a promise about any one person [11][12].

Oxygen delivery, not lung size, sets the ceiling. A review of the underlying biology puts training-driven rises in VO2 max down mostly to a larger volume of red blood cells, the cells that carry oxygen around the body, and a bigger stroke volume, the amount of blood the heart pushes out with each beat [13].

That same review reports that every previously untrained person in the studies it covers improved, provided the training passed some threshold of volume or intensity [13].

The fall with age runs through two other channels. A review of ageing research attributes it mainly to a declining maximum heart rate and a shrinking amount of lean body mass, the muscle and organ tissue that burns the oxygen [18]. Exercise does not slow the drop in maximum heart rate, though it can hold on to some of the lean mass [18]. Training moves your starting level rather than the rate at which it falls [1][18].

A high number does not by itself mean high endurance. Among competitive athletes it works alongside the lactate threshold, the effort level above which lactate builds up in the blood faster than the body clears it, and efficiency, the oxygen cost of holding a given speed or power [14]. Two athletes with identical VO2 max values can perform very differently [14].

The ranges above are arithmetic, not separate measurements. The classification publishes its bands as percentages of each group's average [20], so most of the figures here are those percentages applied to the Brazilian averages [1]. The five labels are descriptive rather than health thresholds - nothing in that classification says what changes for someone who moves from fair to good [20].

Every table describes the population it came from, and those populations disagree. Age-related values in healthy Koreans differed from Western ones, and the authors concluded that fitness should be judged against national standards rather than one global chart [6]. In a separate set of 18,189 Brazilian treadmill tests, Norwegian men and women scored above both the American and Brazilian groups in every age band [2]. Among about 12,000 British adults screened at private clinics, the middle half of the 9,204 men scored between 30.5 and 44.7, a lower and wider spread than the Brazilian reference group [5]. The size of the sex gap is not settled either - those British women sit far closer to the British men than either Brazilian set would predict [5].

The reference points move over time. The 2022 American standards came out 1.5 to 4.6 points lower than the 2015 version they replaced [3]. In 354,277 Swedish working adults tested between 1995 and 2017, average fitness dropped by 4.2 points and the share below the study's low-fitness cut-off of 32 rose from 27% to 46%, with about a third of that tracking rising body weight [8]. A review pooling 2,525,827 adults across eight countries tested between 1967 and 2016 found the same direction, a fall of 7.7% overall [19]. Matching today's average is a lower bar than matching the average of 1995.

A chart also compares different people at one moment rather than following the same people as they age. Those two designs disagree, and a review of both found the studies that retested the same people consistently report the steeper fall [21]. Across the American cross-sectional tests the drop works out at about 4 points a decade [3], against roughly 10% per decade when the same people are followed [18].

The machine changes the number too. In 15,045 tests from an American registry of people with heart disease, treadmill results averaged 21% higher than cycle results [9]. The British and Swedish figures above were estimated from submaximal tests, meaning they were worked out from how the body responded at moderate effort rather than read off a test to exhaustion [5][8]. A wrist reading is looser still: against laboratory measurement in 40 healthy adults, Apple Watch Series 10 read about 6 points low and placed only 5 of them in their correct fitness band [10].

The survival figures describe associations measured across whole populations. They are not evidence that raising one person's score changes that person's own odds [11][12]. None of these papers reports how much the same person's score moves between two tests, so they cannot say how large a change has to be before it beats ordinary measurement noise.

Who these numbers do not describe:

• anyone under 15 or over 74, the outer limits of the Brazilian age bands [1]
• competitive endurance athletes, whose results depend on lactate threshold and efficiency as much as on VO2 max [14]
• people with heart or lung conditions. In 16 adults with a Fontan circulation, a surgically rerouted heart with one working pumping chamber, the peak oxygen figure averaged 66% of what would be expected for their age and size [17]
• anyone tested on equipment other than a treadmill, given the 21% gap between machines [9]

Take a man of 45 whose test comes back at 42.

His band is 45-54, where good runs from 38.5 to 42.5 [20], so 42 sits inside it, near the top. Against the same table's averages he is above average whether or not he trains, since men who train averaged 40.5 and men who do not averaged 35.6 [1]. Against the British screening data, where the middle half of 9,204 men ran from 30.5 to 44.7, that same 42 sits inside the middle half rather than above it [5].

Both readings are right. They answer different questions: one asks how he compares with healthy Brazilians picked for a reference set, the other how he compares with British adults who paid for a private health check.

Now give the same 42 to a woman of 45. Her good band runs from 29.5 to 32.7 [20][1], so the identical score puts her about 11 points above her group average and well above her range, while leaving him just inside his. Whether a score counts as good depends on age and sex together, which is why no single cut-off answers it.

Looking further out, the roughly 10% per decade fall measured by retesting the same people would put a man starting at 42 nearer 38 by the time he is 55 [18].