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0:00 There are two ways to increase your VO2 max, the flashy way and the boring way. And if you're frustrated with a slow progress or confusing advice, you're not alone. So, after 10 years as a professional triathlete and two degrees in sports science and physiotherapy, I'm going to show you how to increase your VO2 max in the most efficient way possible and the new concept in sports science that completely changed the way I look at VO2 max and performance. To start, I'm going to show you how much you can actually expect to increase your VO2 max and how fast you can expect to do it. So, the problem with social media is that we've all developed this weird relationship with results. And nowhere is that more obvious than with VO2 max.
0:45 So, let me give you some real-world expectations and show you what the science actually has to say. Now, I had a client last year that was obsessed with his VO2 max. He was getting it measured in a lab every eight weeks and it was sitting somewhere in the mid-40s. But, he had convinced himself that it needed to be in the 60s. So, every single time he came back with a new number from a new test, it was slightly better than the last one. But, he kept being extremely frustrated anyway. He was so fixated on the gap between where he was and where he thought he should be that he kept ditching his plan and looked for the new flashy workout. But, here's the thing. He was actually
1:32 progressing exactly as he should have been, maybe even a bit faster. You see, a meta-analysis from 2013 found that even with an optimized protocol, you can expect to increase your VO2 max by just under 1 L per minute over 6 to 12 weeks. That's it. That's what good progress looks like. Now, the less trained you are, the faster you'll improve and the more trained you are, the less you'll improve. But, nobody goes from 40 to 60 in 3 months. Unless you're some type of genetic freak. But, still, even if you have the right expectations, we all want to improve our VO2 max as fast as possible. So, now I'm going to show you what science has actually proven to be
2:18 an optimal protocol. Now, here's where it gets confusing because, depending on who you follow, you'll hear something completely different about how to actually improve your VO2 max. Some people swear by 4 by 4-minute intervals, and some people say that easy zone 2 running is all you need. And every few months, someone drops a new program claiming to have the workout figured out. But, here's what has been proven in the real world and also in studies. So, when I started doing triathlons, the Norwegian 4 by 4-minute intervals were the big thing. We were all doing some variation of it almost every week because the best athletes were training that way. But, then, slowly, something shifted. More and more world-class
3:05 athletes started doing more and more [clears throat] volume instead. Nothing crazy hard, just consistent high volume week after week. And their results were just as good, if not better. So, the question is, who was right? It turns out, both. Most of the newer research agrees that, over the long term, hard interval training and easy continuous running produce almost identical gains in VO2 max as long as the volume is the same. So, if you want to improve your VO2 max in the most effective way possible, you need both. Now, I know what you're thinking because I was thinking that at first, too. So, does that mean that it does not matter what we do? And you can just do whatever to
3:52 increase your VO2 max. Not exactly. And that brings me to the next thing I'm going to show you, which is how to improve your VO2 max in the most efficient way possible. Now, the problem is that even though VO2 max isn't the only thing that matters for performance, if yours is low, it's worth paying attention to anyways. Research has linked a lower VO2 max to higher mortality rates and worse performance. And it can be very discouraging to learn that you need years of consistent training to really move the needle. But, the good news is that you actually don't need months to see a meaningful improvement. Research has shown that you can improve it in as little as 2 weeks. So, let me show you how. Now, when I was
4:37 preparing for short-distance triathlons in the later years, we switched to a high-volume approach, meaning I would do most of my training easy or at threshold and not much VO2 max work. We'd only add VO2 max work in the final 6 to 8 weeks before racing. But, those 6 to 8 weeks of training was usually enough to take me from struggling at high speeds to competing at European Cups. And the research actually back this up. A scientific review from 2025 looked at different types of interval training and found that repeated sprint training produced some of the fastest improvements in VO2 max with meaningful gains showing up in just 14 days at three sessions per week. So, if you need
5:24 to improve your VO2 max in the fastest way possible after not doing hard work for some time or simply because you want that initial boost, the authors suggests three different protocols. First, you can do high-intensity interval training where you do intervals of 140 seconds hard work with 165 seconds of recovery. Second, you can do sprints interval training where you do intervals of 30 seconds sprints or less with 97 seconds recovery or less. Or third, you can do the repeated sprints where you do a series of 10 seconds all out sprints separated with less than 60 seconds recovery in between. Now, in my experience, these protocols are not magic and I think the principles of the
6:11 workouts are probably better to pay attention to than copying them straight up. But, they will give you a good starting point to get that initial boost to your VO2 max. If you want a full protocol that follows these principles, I've made one for you that you can get completely for free in the description. But, this is also where most people stop improving. So, now I'm going to show you how to avoid that. Research has shown that if you keep doing VO2 max protocols, you'll eventually burn out, get injured, or simply stop responding to it. In fact, this scientific review from 2025 found that you'll see the biggest gains in VO2 max after about 10 weeks of training it specifically. After that, the improvement flattens out. But,
6:57 thankfully, there's something we can do to keep improving and it's this. Now, I learned this the hard way when I first started running. My goal was to run a sub 15-minute 5K and I was convinced I'd get there in about a year. But, after 12 months of consistent training, I only had a sub 20-minute 5K to show for it. Don't get me wrong, that isn't bad, but it wasn't where I wanted to be. So, I did what most people do. I pushed harder and I trained more and I got injured. After that, my coach sat me down and said something that I did not want to hear, but that I needed to hear. He said, "If you really want to be great, your timeline can't be 1 year.
7:45 It has to be at least five. And to be completely honest, I really didn't like it. In fact, I hated it, and I wanted to prove him wrong. Like, I believed that somehow I was different from everyone else. But, this guy was a great athlete himself, so I accepted it, and I started listening to his advice. And the funny thing is that after 4 years, I ran a 14:43 5K coming off the bike in a sprint triathlon. So, here's what I want you to take away from this. The solution in the long term isn't a better, harder, magical program. It's accepting the fact that while we can use some specific protocols to get a quick
8:32 boost, and I think they are great for that, the real adaptation compounds over time. Consistency isn't a consolation prize for people who can't handle real training. It's the actual boring thing that'll blow up your VO2 max in the long term. But, there's another thing that I want to show you that impacts VO2 max and your performance that has only just been studied in recent years. And research has shown that it can actually make you up to 33% worse if you don't train it. Let me explain. So, here's the problem. A high VO2 max doesn't guarantee a great marathon or any long endurance event, really, because when you run for a long
9:17 time, your ability to sustain a high percentage of that VO2 max slowly declines. This phenomenon is also called durability, and it basically means that your VO2 max isn't a fixed score. It's a variable. But, here's how to make sure that it declines as slowly as possible. So, think of your durability as a speed limit. At the start of a marathon, you pick a pace that feels strong but doable. Your body has a ceiling for how hard it can work over a long distance. If you stay under it, you can keep moving at that pace. But if you push past it, you'll fall apart before the race is over. The problem is that ceiling doesn't stay where it started.
10:05 As your fatigue sets in, it slowly drops. But you're still trying to run the same pace. So, even though nothing about your legs has changed, that pace is now creeping closer and closer to limit that's coming down to meet you. Eventually, the pace you started with is above the limit entirely. And now your body forces you to slow down. You simply have no choice. Your job is to build a more efficient engine, so that speed limit does not come down. So, the question is how do we do that? Well, this is a relatively new concept, so we don't have that much evidence yet. But according to a review from 2025, there are three things you can do. The first
10:51 one is to lift heavy weights. Strength training, especially heavy lifting and explosive training, helps protect your durability. Second, you can literally practice getting tired. So, try to do some long sessions where you include efforts at race pace or faster by the end of your run when you're already fatigued. That's one way to teach your body to hold its limit when it needs to. And then, there's the one that nobody wants to hear about. Years of consistent volume. The speed limiter rises slowly, and it's protected by the same boring consistency that built it in the first place. So, now you know how to increase your VO2 max the most efficient way possible and
11:37 how to keep it durable, and you can even get complete protocol for free in the description. But, if you want to run faster, VO2 max is actually not the best predictor of performance. So, go watch this video next. We'll teach you what is and exactly how to train it.
