Erik Ostberg
Discover Paper
Researchers at Norwegian University have figured out a way to calculate your ‘fitness age” or how well your body functions physically, relative to how well it should work, given your age. The researchers took 5,000 Norwegians between the ages of 20 to 90 years old. They gauged it with 12 variables including height, body mass index, resting heart rate, HDL and total cholesterol levels. Each person also filled out a lengthy lifestyle questionnaire. Lastly, each volunteer ran to the point of exhaustion on a treadmill to pinpoint his or her peak oxygen intake (VO2 max), or how well the body delivers oxygen to its cells under duress. Peak oxygen intake has been shown in large-scale studies to closely correlate with longer life spans, even among the elderly or overweight. In other words, VO2 max can also tell someone their fitness age. However the point of the study was to create a way for someone to calculate their fitness age without fancy lab equipment. In order to figure out how to estimate VO2 max without a treadmill, the scientists went through the results to determine which of the data points were most useful. The most physically stressing tasks were not the most helpful. Instead, the researchers found that putting just five measurements, waist circumference; resting heart rate; frequency and intensity of exercise; age; and sex into an algorithm allowed them to predict a person’s VO2 max with noteworthy accuracy, according to their