The Cooper Clinic VO₂max norms are predicted from treadmill time, and run well above measured values at older ages
Why do VO₂max charts disagree?
The finding
Median VO₂max, Cooper against FRIEND: men 70–79, 30.9 against 24.4; women 60–69, 28.8 against 20.0; women 70–79, 27.6 against 18.3. In the 20s they are close (men 43.9 against 48.0).
- Authors
- Kaminsky LA, Arena R, Myers J (FRIEND 2015, Table 3)
- Published
- Mayo Clinic Proceedings 90(11):1515–1523 · 2015
- Evidence
- Read in the primary source; numbers checked.
- Source
- pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4919021/
How it was studied
Table 3 of the FRIEND paper prints the Cooper Clinic percentiles beside FRIEND’s, footnoted as "predicted from Balke test time or work rate".
The numbers
The difference changes the answer a person gets. A man of 72 with a VO₂max of 30 scores about P44 against the Cooper table and about P73 against FRIEND. A woman of 65 with 28 scores about P44 against Cooper and above P90 against FRIEND.
What it does not show
Cooper Clinic patients are a mostly well-educated, health-screened group. The two sources measure different things, so a percentile depends heavily on which table is used.
What Longstanding does with it
The app’s VO₂max table is the Cooper Institute table as republished by Garmin. All 48 of its values for ages 20–79 match that table exactly, and below P40 the app extrapolates. The app’s source label currently calls it FRIEND, which is wrong; this site names the table correctly.