Nagel Family Website

I started my participation as a human guinea pig in a VO2 max study at UB this morning. It was quite an experience.

They started with the typical stuff: height, weight, questionnaire, body fat measurements, then fitted me for a crazy headpiece that held a mouthpiece right near my mouth and hooked up a heart rate monitor. After a few minutes of warm-up on the bike, they started the testing, plugging my nose which forced me to breathe only using my mouth, which I’m not used to at all. As the time went on, they kept checking my heart rate and perceived level of exertion. Once I thought I was at a certain level, they began collecting what I exhaled in giant sacs. All the while, I had to maintain a pace of 70rpm on the bike as they increased the resistance on the bike.

My mouth got very, very dry and the mouthpiece filled with saliva (yummy, eh?). It was like breathing through a snorkel with a bit of water in there. When I felt like I had a minute left, they made the final adjustments and got the last bit of data. It’s hard to think, “I have 1 minute left” but I had to make the call at some point. I could have kept going, but maintaining the 70rpm would have been hard.

Then they emptied the sacs through some fancy equipment which measured how much I exhaled and how much of that was oxygen versus carbon dioxide.

There were other participants coming & going as I was there, and I felt like the oldest and most out-of-shape person in the group. I probably am, too. I don’t have any data yet, but to use as a baseline:

The average young untrained male will have a VO2 max of approximately 3.5 litres/minute and 45 ml/kg/min. The average young untrained female will score a VO2 max of approximately 2.0 litres/minute and 38 ml/kg/min. … World class male athletes, cyclists and cross-country skiers typically exceed 80 ml/kg/min and a rare few may exceed 90 ml/kg/min for men and 70 ml/kg/min for women. (via Wikipedia)

After more testing this week, there’s nothing next week, followed by 6 weeks of training then a final week of testing. As I get data about myself, I’ll share it. Then we’ll see if I can improve on those figures over the next 8 weeks.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 11:51 am and is filed under Fitness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.