Does 50 percent of your VO2 max really come from the first 20 miles of your overall mileage?

Phillyrunner wrote:

This amazes me if the law of diminishing returns is this prevalent.

Anyway,is this true?

I do not understand your question.

There is ample data showing that once you get past about 20 mpw (or expending 2000 kcals/week of exercise) that all cause mortality decreases greatly. Additional exercise can lead to some improvement, but the gains are much smaller.

I just wonder if someone is mixing up data.

Phillyrunner wrote:

This amazes me if the law of diminishing returns is this prevalent.

Anyway,is this true?

Im calling bullshit on that article

Of course the article says nothing about velocity at Vo2max. Vo2max means nothing if you can't use that oxygen effeciently to produce forward propulsion.

Alan

It´s the same old Owen Anderson BS: high mileage is useless, intensity is more important bla bla.

orly? wrote:

Im calling bullshit on that article

well sonny I call bullshit on your calling bullshit!

After taking a few years off I ran for 10 months averaging 20mpw.Off this meager milage I ran a 16:45 5000 on the track.Five years prior I ran 15:58 off 40mpw.If you take into account the aging process from 44 to 49 that leaves about 15 seconds difference over 5000 on double the miles!So go run ur galldang junk put them big numbers up all ur doing is wearing out your body and maybe if you don't get injured running a tad faster off way less and way more fun training.See OA is right about alot of things.Now some runners respond to miles and some runners respond better to quality .The best runners get a big boost from both they call them the top dogs the rest of us are just having fun

I'm pretty sure your V02max can fluctuate 10% no matter how much you train. Correct me if i'm wrong but it's much more nature than nuture.

thechamelion wrote:

I'm pretty sure your V02max can fluctuate 10% no matter how much you train. Correct me if i'm wrong but it's much more nature than nuture.

I am pretty sure the op was wondering about diminishing returns when it comes to training.

From the OA see link in my first response:

Scientific investigations indicate that expanding one' s training from just five weekly miles to about 25 miles per week can improve performance by around 20-25 per cent, and upgrading weekly mileage from 25 to 50 miles can boost performance by 10 per cent or so. However, changing from 50 to 70 weekly miles nets very small (or no) gains in performance, and going beyond 70 miles per week has not been linked with any measurable physiological benefits but has been related to dramatic increases in the risk of overtraining and injury. The relationship between training mileage and performance gains is an excellent example of the familiar law of diminishing returns.

Well, let's say your Vo2max before you begin training is 50ml/kg. A high normal. After a couple years of training your Vo2max rises to 70ml/kg. Would it be that hard to believe that you could go from 50ml/kg to 60ml/kg with very minimal training.

Alan

Owen the Bullshitter wrote:

It´s the same old Owen Anderson BS: high mileage is useless, intensity is more important bla bla.

I agree.

To answer the original question, the first 50% comes from being alive.

Alan has it right.

So, to answer the original poster, yes, diminishing returns occurs. But you have to realize that this isn't in a business sense right, this is training.

So this 'diminishing returns' is actually necessary if you want to improve (ie. get faster, stronger... blah blah)... it just requires more work to achieve less initially (ie. when you were running 20mpw)...

Food for thought:

Say if I had run an average of an extra 15 miles each week (15 x 4 weeks x 4 months = 240 more miles this summer) to be 15 seconds faster at regionals... i would absolutely do it.

(this obviously means... with everything else staying constant... no injuries blah blah blah)...

Although I have not seen this specific claim, I have read findings that show rapidly diminishing returns in V02 max as mileage increases. I can believe the claim is true. But so what? If you read up a bit on exercise performance, you'll understand that V02 max is not the be all and end all of running.

Tim Noakes is excellent on this subject. The correlation between V02 max and running performance is not that high. And, though measured V02 max does not appear to improve once the athlete reaches about 60 miles per week, there are other performance factors--such as those related to running efficiency--that continue to improve as training mileage increases.

The real lesson of this statistic is to not get hung up on VO2 max.

test

FiftyOne wrote:

well sonny I call bullshit on your calling bullshit!

After taking a few years off I ran for 10 months averaging 20mpw.Off this meager milage I ran a 16:45 5000 on the track.Five years prior I ran 15:58 off 40mpw.If you take into account the aging process from 44 to 49 that leaves about 15 seconds difference over 5000 on double the miles!So go run ur galldang junk put them big numbers up all ur doing is wearing out your body and maybe if you don't get injured running a tad faster off way less and way more fun training.See OA is right about alot of things.Now some runners respond to miles and some runners respond better to quality .The best runners get a big boost from both they call them the top dogs the rest of us are just having fun

I call bullshit on your calling bullshit of his bullshit. Your 16:45 wasn't off 10 months of 20 mpw. It was off that plus a lifetime of running.

your vo2 max is mostly natural at what ever level it is...you can only train it by at most 10%. so no. you were lied to.

Who knows? Who cares? You have to run a lot to reach your potential. 20 mpw will get you nowhere, no matter how much of your VO2 max comes from it.

I can only speak on my own experiences. I started running at age 33 and ran about 20-30 miles per week average for the next 6 years. My 5 mile race pace was around 6:45-6:50. Then I had a scare as I was experiencing numbness in my hands and feet. They thought I had MS. I took a year of from running. The numbness went away and I started back running at age 41. That first year back I still ran about 20-30 mpw and could barely get under 7 minute pace for 5 miles. Then I started traing for my first marathon attempt and got my mileage up to 60 mpw. That year my 5 mile times got down to 6:30 pace and continued to drop into the low 6's. All this time I did very little quality training. Now at age 48 I do more quality and about 50-60 miles per week and my 5 mile times on a fast course have dipped below 6 minute pace for 5 miles. My point is I seemed to get a huge benefit when my mileage went from 20-30 mpw to 60 mpw. What it all means I have no idea.

Dan Moriarity wrote:

Who knows? Who cares? You have to run a lot to reach your potential. 20 mpw will get you nowhere, no matter how much of your VO2 max comes from it.

It will get you a lot closer to your race potential than many obsessive posters would like to believe.

What I do know from high level athletes like Bob Kennedy, Meb, Deena Kastor, and some others that ran much lower mileage in college is that increasing from 60mpw to ~100 yields a track performance improvement of 5-7%. That's it. That's in their race results, and keep in mind, these are people physiologically oriented toward aerobic poower instead of speed and higher mileage. I also know one person who increased from 60 to 110 and improved his marathon time by roughly 15% (2:55 to 2:25) and was one of the top Americans at Boston one year.

So what I see in the article, the 5mpw to 25mpw yields a 25 percent improvement, 25->50 yields a 10 percent improvement in race performance, seems quite reasonable.

You won't see college runners doing 20mpw (unless doing 800 as a sprint). And Tim Noakes did talk about the inaccuracy of VO2max in TRAINED runners (in important distinction), but Noakes also has a subsection about elite runners achieving remarkable results on little training, and the issue here is talent over mileage.

Bob Kennedy ran something like 14:30 on 35mpw. Certainly by this point, most of the aerobic gain simply due to mileage has already been seen, and for people who can't break 16-17 on 30mpw or so, the chance of ever breaking 14 on any amount of mileage is practically nil.

Regardless of what has been found in the lab 99 out of 100 top runners run a good deal more then 20 mph. A good number of the top run more then 20 miles pe day.

Also Clayton had a Vo2 of 68, low for a world beater, was running and raceing per drugs. Did not seem to hold hem back.