I actually felt pretty good after maxxing myself out at 197 bpm with the stair run exercise, although I am also not eager to repeat it. I was more zonked the following day after accumulating 12,000 steps walking back and forth to school where I then interacted with pre-schoolers. Of course, not everybody has easy access to stairwells. I live in an early-mid 20th century high school with 4 floors (including the basement) and 12 ft. ceilings. and stairwells meant to accommodate hordes of high schoolers, in a building now occupied by seniors who always use the elevators. Apparently, surgeons used to use the ability to ascend 8 flights of stairs at any speed as a gauge for being fit enough to survive surgery. Also, Rocky seemed to favor this exercise.
jacob wrote: More objectively, though, I think the causal links are too complex to be reduced to a single variable and I think it would be a mistake to presume that this variable is more powerful than a set of likely latent variables just because the researchers can easily measure the former.
Yes, this is towards what I was attempting to communicate through my usage of italics in my latest post from "Biomarkers" thread below.
Since the standard estimate for maximum heart rate for females is 220 - (.67 X Age), it obviously follows that my biological age is only 34, so highly likely that I will live to be 110.
Heart health is not a perfect proxy for athletic fitness and athletic fitness is by no means a perfect proxy for biological age. For example, there was also a study done on females which thoroughly defeated hypothesis, because it indicated that females who are athletic see their VO2 numbers decline more rapidly with age than sedentary or moderately active females.
Also, any time you are resorting to general population statistics, you are in a sense stuck in the collapsing Modern. That's why I like to make whimsical use of them. One of the problems with Medicine 2.0 which I believe is also true of Medicine/Fitness 3.0 (to the extent I have explored it) is the lack of comprehension of the bias that may be baked in the cake beyond that which is captured by standard statistical analysis package. For example, the reason why Stephen J. Gould had to write an entire book, "The Mismeasure of Man" in refutation of Herrnstein and Murray's "The Bell Curve." I would suggest that it is entirely possible that statistics related to VO2 suffer from many of the same issues as statistics related to race and IQ, because those who engage in physical fitness or sports activities on a near daily basis (10% general population roughly) represent a sub-group of the population that may also significantly vary from the general population in other ways.
Another problem would be that longitudinal studies that have bearing on health outcomes may fail to reflect rapidly changing lifestyles. For example, smoking cigarettes is still the lifestyle practice contributing to the most deaths in the U.S., but this in some part due to the fact that those who are now old were more likely to be smokers.
A good example of the sort of health-related nonsense that is regularly promulgated by even reputable news outlets was a recent analysis of sexually transmitted diseases in senior citizens. The graph which was produced by a health management organization based on statistics generated from their group of practitioners, was topped by headline "Greatest Rise in STDs in Senior Population" and accompanied by a picture of gray-haired couple sitting on bench embracing. What the articles failed to mention was (1)that the statistic was based on requests for STD testing rather than results, and (2) the actual number of requests by seniors was so low it was near to rounding error of the number of requests by youngest group. And if simple stupidity of everybody engaged is put aside, the obvious "follow the money" motivation is that senior citizens have health insurance that will pay for STD testing if they request it at one of the for-profit organization's member clinics.
Anyways, beyond the increasingly weak, collapsing, biased, and money-seeking statistical analysis found at Modern and the not very useful for much but whimsy/critique Post-Modern (where I am often stuck) is Systems View Appropriate to Complexity at Level Yellow. The problem here is that Systems Science, Human Immunology, Neurobiology, Human Genetics, and Probability Theory in the form of all physical textbooks to be mastered would almost certainly exceed a mass equivalent to that of my ass if placed in a backpack while attempting staircase exercise.
), REHIT is a protocol that targets the phosphagen pathway by burning out its 10-15 second reserve capacity and then going slightly over to begin ramping up the glycolytic system (good for 3-4 minutes). Even if it goes mostly unused, this protocol still triggers it a little bit. It is the glycolytic pathways that have bearing on VO2max. As such REHIT is an improvement over e.g. zone2 training which otherwise never activate the the glycolytic system beyond its normal resting state (all three systems are always active but in different proportions).