Fitness age is a very crude measure of health, especially when estimated by an online calculator that relies on you to measure your resting heart rate and doesn’t take into account a huge list of other factors and contexts that contribute to your overall health and wellness, like your medical history, organ function, mental health and many other factors.

In this way, fitness age has often been compared to BMI, ie it’s a broad measurement of health that doesn’t always tell the overall picture

Despite this, there is evidence to support the fact that VO2 max analysis can reveal greater truths about our health. Research from 2011 found that measuring our VO2 max was a “powerful predictor of premature morbidity and mortality for healthy adults as well as those with cardiovascular disease” and that there was a “fundamental connection between aerobic capacity and longevity”. This has been backed up by a study this year in the British Medical Journal, which confirms that cardiorespiratory fitness is an important measure of health and should be incorporated into public health practice.

What is our ‘fitness age’ and what does it really reveal about our health?