What is VO2Max and how can you increase it?

As all sportsmen and women know, oxygenation of the body and muscles is essential for intense activity and necessary to achieve high levels of performance and obtain convincing physical results. But this oxygenation is often limited by our body's ability to transport oxygen in the blood. There is, however, a natural solution that poses no danger to health and enables you to rapidly increase your VO2max. This is the VO2 Xtreme food supplement, the benefits of which we will describe in detail below.

The benefits of VO2 Xtreme for increasing your VO2max

VO2 Xtreme capsules enable the body to significantly increase its VO2max, i.e. the maximum volume of oxygen consumed per unit of time during physical effort. This VO2max is crucial to sports performance.

VO2 Xtreme is made up of different plants with multiple stocks on our cells whose oxygenation it improves, all by increasing the speed and efficiency of oxygen transport by the blood.

Echinacea herb extracts help to increase the production of EPO, while nettle and dandelion extracts, rich in iron, help to eliminate toxins from the blood while increasing the production of red blood cells.

With VO2 Xtreme, you can therefore considerably increase your resistance to exertion and your physical performance during sporting activities, without damaging your health.

Dosage and special precautions

The recommended dosage when taking VO2 Xtreme as a nutritional supplement is around 3 capsules a day, to be taken with meals.

This natural product contains no GMOs or allergens and is therefore perfectly tolerated by the body. However, it is not recommended for pregnant or breast-feeding women.

Clinical studies demonstrating the effectiveness of VO2 Xtreme

Various clinical studies have been carried out to demonstrate the action and effectiveness of VO2 Xtreme as a nutritional supplement for athletes. It has been shown that this nutritional supplement increases performance during physical exercise by more than 23%.

Other benefits, such as protecting red blood cells and muscle fibres, increasing cellular oxygenation and reducing fatigue, as well as providing significant antioxidant protection, have also been proven.

The importance of Vo2Max in sport

What is Vo2Max? In reality, this term refers to the maximum consumption of oxygen by the muscles during physical effort or when practising a sporting activity, in order to produce energy. It refers to the maximum volume of oxygen used per minute. This quantity is expressed here in litres of oxygen per minute and is sometimes related to the unit of body mass (weight). This relationship to body mass makes it possible to further refine the calculation and reliability of this measurement, particularly in terms of the differences between men and women.

More specifically, we can see that a higher Vo2Max is synonymous with better performance. Of course, this is not the only factor influencing performance, as genetic factors, energy output, maintenance of Vo2Max and more psychological factors must also be taken into account. So two people with the same amount of Vo2Max will not necessarily have the same sporting performance. However, this factor remains predominant in the results obtained and physical endurance.

The body's Vo2Max level also varies according to sex, age, the sport practised and the level of training. In particular, the Vo2Max level in women is between 25 and 70 ml/kg/min, whereas in men it averages between 30 and 90 ml/kg/min. This difference is explained by a naturally lower haemoglobin level in women than in men.

The type of physical activity practised also influences Vo2Max levels. Athletes who regularly take part in endurance activities such as running, walking or cycling will have a higher Vo2Max than those who take part in more intensive sports but with shorter duration efforts. Top-level athletes practising these endurance disciplines have Vo2Max rates of between 90ml/kg/min for men and 70 ml/kg/min for women.

With these few explanations, you will no doubt have a better understanding of the importance of having a high level of Vo2Max if you want to improve your physical and sporting performance.

How do you calculate your VO2Max?

Some sportspeople who are aware of the need for oxygen intake during training and physical effort want to go further by assessing their VO2Max. But is it necessary to know this figure precisely? In reality, knowing your VO2max precisely is extremely useful if you want to know how to improve your performance and whether your training is adapted to your needs. But how can you find out exactly what your VO2max is?

Unfortunately, it's not currently possible to calculate your VO2Max yourself, as this information is only assessed in the laboratory, and more specifically in medical centres specialising in sports medicine. The calculation carried out by the doctors in these centres is based on the exchange of different gases, i.e. oxygen and carbon dioxide. This measurement is, of course, carried out during what is known as a "stress test", i.e. while the patient being tested is running on a treadmill or performing some other intense physical effort. During this test, the intensity of the exercise performed is modelled and varies in order to see the fluctuations in oxygen consumption by the body. As the intensity increases, oxygen consumption reaches a maximum level, at which point it eventually stagnates.

The sports equipment used in these VO2Max evaluation tests is equipment that enables the intensity of the effort to be controlled. This may involve a treadmill, rowing machine, home trainer or exercise bike. The choice of instrument can, of course, be adapted according to the sporting discipline practised by the patient to be tested, for greater accuracy of results. Remember that the muscles used by each sport vary. As a result, a runner will benefit more from a study of his VO2Max on a treadmill and a cyclist from the same assessment on an exercise bike.

So what are the benefits of this VO2Max test and why is it useful to know your maximum oxygen consumption during exercise? First of all, it will tell you whether your performance can be improved by some specific training or by taking a specific nutritional supplement like the one we are presenting here, or whether you have already reached the optimum level (which is relatively rare). But depending on this result, you can also set yourself a target to work towards and make faster, more effective progress.

As well as this VO2Max test, we also recommend that you take advantage of your visit to a sports medicine centre to test your VMA or maximum aerobic speed, which will also help you to assess your performance and the effectiveness of your training, while defining your intensity zones.

A few tips for increasing your VO2Max

As we explained above, taking a natural nutritional supplement with high-quality active ingredients like the one we have presented on this page will help you to improve your VO2Max. But you can also implement other solutions to improve this performance even further.

First of all, you can carry out training based on intermittent work. This is a method well known to top-level athletes who practise it regularly. Several detailed techniques can be found on the Internet and are easy to implement, such as split work, fartlek and interval training. The idea here is to produce repeated efforts interspersed with recovery periods, and the different techniques vary according to the duration of the effort and recovery. The repetitions remain stable.

Thanks to these specific exercises, you can intensively stimulate your cardiovascular functions. By performing fractions of an effort at maximum intensity over the long term, these sessions increase the maximum heart rate and therefore deliver more oxygen to the muscles during training. Intermittent training sessions can therefore rapidly improve the athlete's abilities, enabling rapid progress to be made with little time required (ideally 35 to 45 minutes per session), increasing the amount of effort made at a high intensity compared with long-distance training, which limits this intensity, and also strengthening psychological resistance to effort by improving motivation, pain resistance and recovery capacity.

What's more, these intermittent training sessions offer a fun aspect that you don't find with other, more repetitive types of training.

Another method used by top-level athletes involves exposure to high altitude. We know that altitude tends to have lower levels of oxygen in the air than elsewhere. Sportsmen and women who do mountain training take advantage of this hypoxia to force their bodies to produce more red blood cells, which improves the transport of oxygen to the muscles.

However, this method has certain limitations, as a simple stay at altitude may not be enough to increase your VO2Max. The production of red blood cells depends on a number of other factors, such as altitude level and the duration of exposure to hypoxia, as well as nutritional factors such as the amount of iron, vitamin B12 and other essential nutrients in the body. In addition, the body's response to hypoxia varies from one individual to another, and some people will react more favourably and more quickly than others to this exposure because of the individual capacity of the bone marrow to produce new red blood cells.

Of course, these two methods can be used together to obtain the best possible results, but they can also be used in conjunction with a course of VO2Max capsules, which will help you to naturally improve your oxygenation and therefore your performance.