What is a good VO2max? Tables by age and sex

For a man of 40, a good VO2max sits around 38 to 42 ml/kg/min. For a woman of 40, around 33 to 37. That is the short answer, and it appears on every page you open.

The long answer is more useful. Almost nobody tells you where those tables come from, how wide the spread around them is, or why your number can sit still while you train like a maniac.

I have been reading that figure off my own watch for years. I have misread it about as often as I have read it right.

What is a good VO2max for your age?

A good VO2max depends on your age and your sex. For men aged 20 to 29, good runs roughly between 44 and 48 ml/kg/min; for women that age, between 38 and 42. Each decade shifts those boundaries down a few points. The table below sets them side by side.

Read the numbers as an indication, not as an exam grade. Depending on which norm set you pick, the boundaries move two to three points.

All values are in millilitres of oxygen per kilo of body weight per minute.

For comparison: team leaders in the professional cycling peloton sit above 75. That number is fine as trivia and useless for your own training.

Where do those tables actually come from?

From norm data on large test populations, of which the Cooper Institute in Dallas is the best known. Researchers measure thousands of people on a treadmill, split the results into percentiles by age and sex, and attach words to them. Good simply means: higher than a large share of the people in that group.

That is not a medical cut-off. It is a ranking.

And that ranking has two properties that rarely make the print. The first is the spread.

Imagine two men of 45 who both land on 40 ml/kg/min. One cycles to work every day and sits just under his ceiling. The other trains three times a week and is coming back from an injury. Same cell in the table, a very different situation.

The second property is how it was measured. Almost all those figures come from cross-sections, testing people of all ages on a single day.

That sounds like a detail. Further down this piece it turns out to be why the decline with age is recorded far too kindly.

What is VO2max, in plain language?

Your VO2max is the amount of oxygen your body can take in and use per minute when you give everything. Two things set that number: how much blood your heart pumps per minute, and how much oxygen your muscles manage to pull out of it. Nothing else.

Think of a pipe with a pump on it. The pump is your heart, the pipe your blood vessels, and the oxygen travels along inside your red blood cells.

Joyner and Coyle described in 2008 how endurance performance rests on three pillars: your VO2max, your lactate threshold and your running economy (PMID 17901124). Your VO2max is the ceiling of the room. How high under that ceiling you can live is set by the second pillar.

That is why a high VO2max guarantees nothing over ten kilometres. I know runners with a lower figure who drop everyone, because they can sit closer to their ceiling for longer.

Which of the two really drives your race time sits in lactate threshold or VO2max.

How do you measure your VO2max?

Three routes exist: your sports watch estimates it from heart rate and pace, a field test such as the Cooper test calculates it from a distance, and a sports lab measures the oxygen in your breath through a mask. Only the last one measures. The first two calculate.

The gap is wider than most people think.

A systematic review from December 2025 laid thirteen studies side by side and found wearables usable in seven of them for recreational athletes, while their usefulness in well-trained endurance athletes remained questionable (PMID 41477023). So your watch is not a measuring instrument, but it is a decent trend line.

The full comparison, including error margins per method, sits in measuring your VO2max.

What is a good VO2max for women?

In women the norm values sit roughly five to eight points below men of the same age. For a woman aged 30 to 39, 35 to 39 ml/kg/min is good; for a woman aged 50 to 59, good sits around 30 to 34. That gap is physiology, not a difference in fitness.

Two things explain most of it. Women carry a higher average body fat percentage, and VO2max is expressed per kilo of body weight. On top of that, average haemoglobin levels are lower in women, so every litre of blood carries slightly less oxygen.

Convert the same measurement to fat-free mass and the gap shrinks considerably.

What plays a bigger role in female endurance athletes is the iron store. Menstrual blood loss plus the iron losses of endurance training put ferritin under pressure sooner, and that hits exactly the transport system from the previous section.

How much does your VO2max fall over the years?

Faster than the tables suggest, and not evenly. In the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, Fleg and colleagues followed 435 men and 375 women aged 21 to 87. The decline accelerated from 3 to 6 percent per ten years in the twenties and thirties to more than 20 percent per ten years above seventy (PMID 16043637).

From the forties onward, the decline per decade was larger in men than in women.

The sting sits in the tail of that study: the acceleration showed up across all activity levels. Training does not stop the clock. It does move it, and that buys years of independent function.

That this counted as news in 2005 comes straight from the measurement problem above. Cross-sections compare a 70-year-old with a 30-year-old of today, and those 70-year-olds are a select, healthy group. Follow the same people through time and the curve turns out steeper.

How much of that you train back, and why forty is a hinge point, sits in VO2max and age.

Why does your VO2max stall while you train hard?

Because training only addresses one side of the equation. You can train your heart to pump more blood, but if that blood carries little oxygen, you are moving air. Iron, haemoglobin, thyroid hormone and low-grade inflammation all sit on the other side.

This is the part that is missing entirely from the pages about VO2max.

Burden and colleagues pooled seventeen studies in endurance athletes with low iron but without anaemia. Iron treatment improved iron status substantially and had a moderate effect on VO2max (Hedges g = 0.61; 95% CI 0.40 to 0.82) (PMID 25361786). That is a group effect in people with a deficiency, not a promise for anyone who takes a pill.

The practical gain sits exactly there. An athlete with low stores is training against a ceiling that is not in their legs.

These links are associations from research, not a diagnosis. A low value does not automatically explain your plateau.

The expanded version of this list, including which value to read next to which training data, sits in cardio fitness and your blood. For endurance athletes specifically, blood values for endurance athletes is the logical next step.

How much VO2max is trainable?

In untrained and moderately trained people, 5 to 10 percent over eight weeks is common. In well-trained endurance athletes the margin is smaller, because they already sit closer to their genetic ceiling. The type of training matters more there than the number of hours.

Helgerud and colleagues compared four training formats at the same total workload. Four times four minutes hard produced 7.2 percent, short 15/15 intervals 5.5 percent, and easy distance work and threshold training came nowhere near (PMID 17414804).

That is one study, in trained men, over eight weeks. Not a law of nature.

The Dutch Gezondheidsraad holds 150 minutes of moderately intensive activity per week in its physical activity guidelines, plus muscle-strengthening work twice a week. That is a floor for health, not a training plan for your VO2max.

The full protocol, including why most people start their four minutes too hard, sits in increasing your VO2max.

What does your VO2max say about your health?

More than it says about your race time, honestly. The American Heart Association called fitness a clinical vital sign in 2016, because low fitness is associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease and mortality, and because fitness sharpens risk classification (PMID 27881567).

The scale on which that was measured is considerable.

Mandsager and colleagues looked at 122,007 people who underwent an exercise test. The fittest group had clearly lower mortality than the least fit group, and there was no upper limit beyond which the benefit stopped (PMID 30646252). That is an association in a large group, not a prediction for you personally.

The Dutch Hartstichting holds the same line on heart rate: how you feel and how you progress weigh more than one number on your screen. The same applies here.

Why the standard risk calculation serves fit people poorly in the first place sits in cardiovascular risk in athletes.

What do you do with your own number?

Compare it with yourself three months ago, not with the table. Note your watch value every month on the same day, after a comparable week, and look at the direction. One reading is noise; three readings are a line.

My other suggestion: put one training number next to it that you control yourself, for instance your pace at a fixed heart rate.

If that line stays flat while your training keeps running, the blood side is a logical place to look. Iron, haemoglobin, thyroid and inflammation markers sit together in InsideTracker, and single values such as haemoglobin already say something about your oxygen transport.

Every blood test result includes a professional assessment from a BIG-registered doctor. For treatment decisions, discuss your results with your GP.

References

• Ross R, Blair SN, Arena R, et al. Importance of assessing cardiorespiratory fitness in clinical practice: a case for fitness as a clinical vital sign. Circulation, 2016;134(24):e653-e699. PMID 27881567.
• Mandsager K, Harb S, Cremer P, Phelan D, Nissen SE, Jaber W. Association of cardiorespiratory fitness with long-term mortality among adults undergoing exercise treadmill testing. JAMA Network Open, 2018;1(6):e183605. PMID 30646252.
• Fleg JL, Morrell CH, Bos AG, et al. Accelerated longitudinal decline of aerobic capacity in healthy older adults. Circulation, 2005;112(5):674-82. PMID 16043637.
• Joyner MJ, Coyle EF. Endurance exercise performance: the physiology of champions. The Journal of Physiology, 2008;586(1):35-44. PMID 17901124.
• Burden RJ, Morton K, Richards T, Whyte GP, Pedlar CR. Is iron treatment beneficial in iron-deficient but non-anaemic endurance athletes? A systematic review and meta-analysis. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2015;49(21):1389-97. PMID 25361786.
• Helgerud J, Hoydal K, Wang E, et al. Aerobic high-intensity intervals improve VO2max more than moderate training. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 2007;39(4):665-71. PMID 17414804.
• Zeleznik Mezan L. Accuracy of wearables for determining the maximal oxygen uptake and lactate threshold: a qualitative systematic review. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 2025;7:1707991. PMID 41477023.
• Gezondheidsraad. Physical activity guidelines.
• Hartstichting. Exercise and your heart rate.