You’ve probably seen it. Some fitness influencer or wellness blogger confidently tells you: “Don’t chase the number.”
And I get it. I understand where they’re coming from. But as a naturopathic doctor who’s spent a decade helping people optimize their health from the inside out, I want to push back on that.
Chase the number. Just understand what it actually means first.
The Problem With Just “Seeing a Score”
Here’s the thing. When someone checks their Apple Watch or Garmin and sees a VO2 Max estimate pop up, all they get is a number floating in a vacuum. 55. 42. 38. Cool. Now what?
That’s the real frustration people are reacting to. And honestly? Fair. A number without context is just noise.
But that’s a problem with how people are measuring, not with the metric itself.
It reminds me of something I see constantly in clinical medicine. We tell older patients with cardiovascular risk to get their LDL cholesterol below 2.0 mmol/L, and the pushback is enormous. “Why? I feel fine. That seems extreme.”
And you know what? I get the resistance. Because all they’re seeing is a number on a lab report.
But if they could see how lowering that number translates into reduced vascular inflammation, more flexible arteries, better blood flow, and less plaque buildup, most of them would be lining up to make it happen.
VO2 Max is the same story.
What VO2 Max Actually Measures (And Why It’s Fascinating)
VO2 Max is the maximum volume of oxygen your body can consume per minute during intense exercise. And when I say consumed, I mean consumed by your cells, where it actually matters.
Think about the chain of events happening in your body when you push hard:
Your nervous system fires signals to your muscles. Your lungs pull in oxygen. Your heart pumps it through your blood via red blood cells. Your microvascular system, those tiny capillaries, distributes it to the tissues. And finally, the mitochondria inside your cells use that oxygen as the final step in producing ATP. Energy.
Every link in that chain matters.
One more thing worth knowing. VO2 Max is divided by body weight. Weight is in the denominator. Which means carrying excess body fat directly suppresses your score, independent of how well your heart and lungs are functioning. That’s not a judgment. That’s just physiology.
What a Real VO2 Max Test Tells You
This is where it gets genuinely exciting from a clinical perspective.
A proper VO2 Max test isn’t just a number. It’s a window into your entire cardiorespiratory system. Done right, you can see whether your nervous system and mobility can tolerate high intensities, how well your lungs are pulling in oxygen under load, how your heart rate responds to increasing effort, how many calories you’re burning at different intensities, and where the inefficiencies are hiding.
That last one is the gold. Because once you know where the system is breaking down, you stop guessing about how to fix it.
Is the bottleneck muscle mass? Then we build strength. Aerobic base lagging? Then we prioritize long, slow distance work. HIIT adaptations not there yet? Then we get strategic about high-intensity intervals. Is chronic fatigue or metabolic dysfunction clouding the whole picture? Is body composition the biggest lever to pull?
These are completely different interventions. And without testing, you’re just throwing darts.
Why I Tell My Patients to Chase the Number
Once you know what the number represents, and you can see which part of the system you’re optimizing, chasing a higher VO2 Max becomes one of the most meaningful health goals you can pursue.
Higher oxygen consumption capacity isn’t just a fitness metric. It’s one of the strongest independent predictors of longevity we have, outperforming many traditional cardiovascular risk markers in the research. The research on this is striking.
It is quite literally a measure of how much life your body can generate per breath.
So yes. Chase the number. But test properly, understand what you’re looking at, and then train for the system, not just the score.
That’s when the real progress begins.
Dr. David Duizer, Naturopathic Doctor, Vancouver BC
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