For example, blood tests of an enzyme called creatine kinase offer a rough estimate of how much muscle damage you’ve ...

This key metric reflects how much oxygen your body uses during a workout. But it isn’t just for athletes—your VO2 max is a critical indicator for your future health and longevity ...

Almost every major smartwatch or sports watch will now estimate your VO2 max without you having to take a gruelling lab test. It’s often branded differently from ‘VO2 max’ on your device or ...

But there’s one metric that stands apart: VO2 max, which provides insight into your aerobic fitness by capturing how well your heart, lungs, circulatory system and muscles work together.

For those unfamiliar, VO2 max might sound like the latest performance-enhancing supplement, but it’s actually the term used to describe your body’s maximum oxygen uptake during aerobic exercise.

With a fitness tracker, you’ll have access to a variety of these health metrics—but there’s one that is key to determining your cardiovascular fitness that you may be ignoring: your VO2 max.

Keeping track of VO2 max on your Garmin is a great way to monitor your aerobic fitness and cardiorespiratory efficiency, and viewing this figure is possible both on the watch and in Garmin Connect.

Whoop, the screenless watchband-like wearable that beat out Oura in my non-watch fitness tracker showdown, has just added a VO2 max feature to its app. Now, just like Garmin, Apple Watch ...

Both of them rely on VO2 max as a gold-standard objective measure of aerobic fitness, rather than trying to estimate fitness or exercise habits. One finds that higher VO2 max is associated with ...