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Lecture Notes

We spent the beginning of this lecture talking about the structure and function of the systems in our body that are associated with cardiorespiratory fitness, but now we're going to shift gears a little bit. In the last part of the lecture we'll talk about how we measure cardiorespiratory fitness, and then also how we design programs with the goal of improving cardiorespiratory fitness. When we talk about measuring cardiorespiratory fitness, we're really talking about measuring maximal oxygen consumption, or VO2 max, for short, and this is the maximum capacity of your body to transport and use oxygen during exercise. So how well does your body move oxygen to the tissues that need it, in particular the working muscles, and how well do those muscles use that oxygen when you're exercising? And so that's really what the maximal oxygen consumption, or VO2 max, is all about. Now we can either directly measure this through a graded exercise test—and we'll talk about what that is on the next page—or we can indirectly measure maximal oxygen consumption through either submaximal tests or some field tests, and again, we'll talk about those on the next few slides as well.