June 17, 2025
Listed here are 5 causes your VO2 max might not be rising as shortly as you’d like, plus ideas for enhancing your cardiorespiratory health.
For those who’re making an attempt to enhance your health however aren’t seeing progress as shortly as you’d hoped, it could be time to be taught extra about your VO2 max.
Cardiorespiratory health, or cardio efficiency capability, is measured when it comes to VO2 max. That is outlined as the utmost quantity of oxygen you may eat per minute for every kilogram of physique weight. The upper this worth is, the higher. Analysis exhibits that rising your VO2 max affords many well being and efficiency advantages.
Appropriate Garmin smartwatches can estimate your VO2 max throughout runs and walks. Some additionally present a VO2 max estimate whenever you use the path operating, ultrarunning, biking or multisport exercise profiles.1
Monitoring modifications in your VO2 max helps assess the outcomes of your life-style and train, offering a pathway to improved efficiency. It may additionally reveal when your progress stalls, a irritating expertise which will depart you questioning why your VO2 max isn’t enhancing, what you’re doing unsuitable and what you are able to do to enhance it.
Listed here are 5 widespread explanation why your VO2 max won’t be rising as shortly as you’d like and what you are able to do about it.
1. Lack of high-intensity efforts
Completely different efforts set off totally different physiological adaptation. Low- and moderate-intensity exercises are vital for total well being, constructing your endurance base and strengthening your muscle tissue. Though lengthy, low-intensity efforts improve VO2 max, particularly if weight reduction is concerned, analysis exhibits that high-intensity exercises extra successfully enhance your VO2 max health degree. Exhausting efforts inform your physiological techniques to adapt in ways in which enhance your potential to supply power aerobically.
Interval coaching, a well-liked and environment friendly technique of including high-intensity efforts into your coaching program, is a cornerstone of coaching applications at any degree in lots of sports activities. Various exercise depth could also be significantly useful as a result of together with the lighter restoration interval between onerous efforts permits way more time spent at larger intensities than would in any other case be attainable.
Free Garmin Coach coaching plans for operating and biking on the Garmin Join™ app (which work seamlessly with appropriate smartwatches) usually embrace interval exercises designed particularly to enhance VO2 max together with different exercises designed to develop endurance, permit restoration and extra.
In case you are extra of a gymnasium rat, you may as an alternative profit from the HIIT exercise profile obtainable on many Garmin smartwatches. With this software, you’ve entry to various kinds of structured HIIT timers corresponding to AMRAP and EMOM, or you may construct a customized HIIT exercise on Garmin Join after which execute it in your watch.
Runners and cyclists typically use tempo runs and rides to set off the event of further cardio efficiency capability. These exercises usually contain operating with an depth of roughly 90% of VO2 max for 40 minutes or longer both in a single chunk or damaged up into intervals.
2. Insufficient restoration
One other widespread downside for these struggling to enhance their VO2 max is an absence of restoration time. Purpose-oriented athletes are sometimes wanting to progress and obtain their targets as shortly as attainable, however this may result in counterproductive coaching that doesn’t permit the physique to rebuild between efforts. It’s really in between exercises that your physique will get sooner, fitter and stronger. To successfully construct efficiency capability, that you must be intentional about resting and recovering. Tackling the subsequent onerous problem earlier than recovering from the final one means you’re lacking the total profit triggered by your earlier exercise.
For those who suspect insufficient restoration is inflicting an absence of progress, strive keeping track of your restoration time. This function on appropriate Garmin smartwatches lets you understand how lengthy you need to wait till your subsequent onerous effort (straightforward runs and rides are effective). This function is not only a easy timer; it’s customized to you and responds to emphasize, every day exercise, sleep high quality and extra.
3. Lack of selection in your efforts
Generally jump-starting a rise in VO2 max is so simple as altering your coaching routine. Excessive-intensity efforts are key to enhancing your VO2 max, however it’s vital to construct a robust basis with quite a lot of efforts. That is the place instruments corresponding to coaching load stability (load focus) come in useful, revealing how your high- and low-intensity cardio efforts in addition to dynamic anaerobic efforts contribute to your total coaching load.
It’s additionally good to vary up the main points of your exercises to maintain them recent. This may be much more vital mentally than bodily. Experiment with totally different cadences, tempos, lengths, durations and peak intensities of your operating and biking exercises.
Together with power and adaptability coaching in your program could make you extra resilient and damage resistant, permitting you to keep away from coaching setbacks — and the ensuing health setbacks. To simply add these elements into your routine, you may obtain quite a lot of exercises — together with power and yoga — from Garmin Hook up with your appropriate watch. You may additionally use Garmin Coach power coaching plans (or add supplemental power coaching to your Garmin Biking Coach or Garmin Run Coach program) to extend power, construct muscle or enhance your health.
For those who need assistance mixing it up, strive utilizing adaptive coaching applications from Garmin Biking Coach and Garmin Run Coach (each of which use your VO2 max estimate) to mechanically modify your exercises primarily based in your health degree.
4. Diminishing returns
As in most areas of life, the regulation of diminishing returns applies to your coaching. The fitter you’re, the tougher it’s essential to work to enhance.
Skilled endurance athletes, who’ve been coaching often for years, are prone to be close to the height of their private cardio efficiency capability. For instance, a plateau in VO2 max is comparatively widespread for individuals who have been coaching and competing in marathons for five to six years.
It additionally isn’t reasonable for anybody to take care of peak efficiency year-round. VO2 max affords a key reference for being at your greatest when it issues most. Tendencies in your VO2 max — and associated insights corresponding to coaching standing in your Garmin smartwatch — reveal how issues are going from one week or month to the subsequent.
5. Genetic potential
Our genetics play an enormous position in how our our bodies develop. Genetics additionally information how our physiology adapts in response to the challenges of life and atmosphere. Some persons are naturally taller, and others are naturally stronger. Some individuals have pure benefits of their potential to gas their efficiency aerobically.
Not everybody improves on the similar charge in response to comparable coaching. It could simply be a matter of time earlier than you see the outcomes you’re working towards. Hold difficult your self often, recovering nicely and getting sufficient sleep. These are components you may management.
Whereas not everybody has the identical most potential, virtually anybody can enhance their VO2 max to a point. For those who’re prepared to enhance yours, take step one by searching our assortment of smartwatches.
1See Garmin.com/ataccuracy