Ross Tucker, PhD, a South African exercise physiologist and coauthor of The Runner’s Body (Rodale, 2009), points to two reasons. “The attraction of finding a single value that determines your performance ability is too great to resist,” he says, “so the notion that VO2max is the physiological stand-in for performance potential has become something of a dogma among runners and within exercise physiology, despite the abundant evidence that performance is far more complex than a single number.”
“Another reason for the exaggerated importance of VO2max to performance is that it is so easy to measure and quantify,” Tucker continues. “Some of the other factors that are recognized for running success, such as muscle-tendon elasticity, the ability to use fat as fuel and the capacity to generate ATP at rapid rates are a lot more difficult to measure, and often impossible to quantify or compare from one runner to the next.”
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