What Is a Good VO₂ Max for Your Age? Percentile Charts for Men and Women

A 40-year-old man with a measured VO₂ max of 35.3 ml/kg/min is exactly average. A 40-year-old woman at 25.7 is exactly average. Those are the 50th percentiles from the largest set of directly measured reference standards in the United States.¹

Most charts you’ll find don’t say that. They say something close, but from 2015 data, or from treadmill times converted into an estimate, or from a watch manufacturer’s marketing page with no citation at all.

So here are the current numbers, where they come from, and the four things that will make your own number look better or worse than it really is. And since the number you actually have is almost certainly a wearable estimate rather than a lab result, SensAI reads it as a trend against your own history rather than a score to chase.

VO₂ max percentiles by age — men

Directly measured VO₂peak on a treadmill, in ml/kg/min. From the 2022 update to the Fitness Registry and the Importance of Exercise National Database (FRIEND).¹

Percentile	20–29	30–39	40–49	50–59	60–69	70–79	80–89
90th	58.6	55.5	50.8	43.4	37.1	29.4	22.8
80th	54.5	50.0	45.2	38.3	32.0	25.9	21.4
70th	51.9	46.4	40.9	34.3	28.7	23.8	20.0
60th	49.0	43.4	37.9	31.8	26.5	22.2	18.4
50th	46.5	39.7	35.3	29.2	24.6	20.6	17.6
40th	43.6	37.0	32.4	26.9	22.8	19.1	16.6
30th	40.0	33.5	29.7	24.5	20.7	17.3	16.1
20th	35.2	29.8	26.7	22.2	18.5	15.9	14.8
10th	28.6	24.9	22.1	18.6	15.8	13.6	12.9

VO₂ max percentiles by age — women

Same registry, same treadmill protocol, same units.¹

Percentile	20–29	30–39	40–49	50–59	60–69	70–79	80–89
90th	49.0	42.1	37.8	32.4	27.3	22.8	20.8
80th	44.8	37.0	33.0	28.4	24.3	20.8	18.4
70th	41.8	33.6	30.0	26.3	22.4	19.6	17.3
60th	39.0	31.0	27.7	24.6	20.9	18.3	16.0
50th	36.6	28.3	25.7	22.9	19.6	17.2	15.4
40th	34.0	26.4	23.9	21.5	18.3	16.2	14.7
30th	30.8	24.2	21.8	20.1	17.0	15.2	13.7
20th	27.2	21.9	19.7	18.5	15.4	14.0	12.6
10th	22.5	18.6	17.2	16.5	13.4	12.3	11.4

How to read your percentile

Find your age column, run down it until you pass your number, and read the label on the left. That’s the share of same-age, same-sex adults in the registry you’d be above.

A rough translation:

Percentile	What it means
80th and above	Well-trained. Aerobic capacity is not your limiting factor.
60th–80th	Comfortably fit. Regular cardio is showing up in the data.
40th–60th	Average for your age and sex. Not a health flag, not an achievement.
20th–40th	Below average. The largest gains per hour of training live here.
Below 20th	Low. Worth a conversation with a physician before hard training.

The bands are descriptive, not diagnostic. Being at the 45th percentile is not a diagnosis — it’s a starting position.

Where these numbers come from — and what the registry is not

FRIEND pools cardiopulmonary exercise tests from 34 US laboratories. The 2022 update covers 22,379 tests — 16,278 on a treadmill, 6,101 on a cycle ergometer — collected between 1968 and 2021.¹ Every value is a directly measured gas-exchange result, not an estimate from treadmill time.

The registry was built and is led by Leonard Kaminsky, PhD, of the Fisher Institute for Health and Well-Being and the Clinical Exercise Physiology Laboratory at Ball State University, who is corresponding author on both the original 2015 standards and the 2022 update.¹²

Three limits worth holding onto:

It isn’t a random sample of the population. These are people who walked into a lab, referred for clinical assessment, fitness testing, or research. The 2022 paper is candid that “apparently healthy” is a loose fit for the whole cohort, and that protocols and equipment varied across labs.¹

It’s American. A separate FRIEND analysis — 11,678 maximal treadmill tests from three countries plus 32,329 previously published tests from six more — found real cardiorespiratory fitness differences between countries.³ The 2022 paper’s own authors say the US standards “should be cautiously applied to individuals from locations outside of the United States.”¹ If you’re reading this from São Paulo or Madrid, treat the chart as a reference frame, not a verdict.

It’s newer and lower than the chart you’ve probably seen. Nearly every VO₂ max article still runs the 2015 table. The 2022 treadmill standards sit 1.5 to 4.6 ml/kg/min lower for men — the male 50th percentile at 20–29 moved from 48.0 to 46.5, and at 30–39 from 42.4 to 39.7.¹² That is a sampling effect from a larger, more representative cohort. It is not evidence that American aerobic fitness collapsed between 2015 and 2022.

Treadmill vs bike VO₂ max: if you tested on a cycle, you’re reading the wrong chart

Averaged across the whole registry, treadmill VO₂peak runs 22% — about 4.5 ml/kg/min — higher than cycle ergometer VO₂peak.¹ Decade by decade the gap is often wider still. More muscle mass is recruited when you run; that’s most of it.

Compare a bike test to a treadmill chart and you will misplace yourself by roughly a full percentile band. The cycle 50th percentiles from the same 2022 dataset:¹

Age	Men (cycle)	Women (cycle)
20–29*	44.0	31.6
30–39	30.2	21.6
40–49	27.4	18.8
50–59	24.5	16.9
60–69	21.7	15.7
70–79	18.3	14.5

*One caution the raw table demands: the 20–29 cycle cells sit oddly high relative to the 30–39 row. The paper’s own explanation is that one contributing site enrolled a group of professional and elite cyclists.¹ Treat that row as unreliable and use the treadmill chart if you’re under 30.

Your watch’s VO₂ max is not the number in these tables

Almost nobody reading this got their VO₂ max from a metabolic cart. You got it from an Apple Watch, a Garmin, or a Fitbit — a model that infers oxygen uptake from heart rate and pace.

The validation literature is not kind, and it does not point in one direction.

Study	Device	Finding
Lambe et al., 2025 — n=304	Apple Watch	Underestimated by a mean 6.07 ml/kg/min; limits of agreement −6.11 to +18.26; MAPE 13.3%
Caserman et al., 2024 — n=195	Apple Watch Series 7	Lab 45.9 vs watch 41.4 ml/kg/min; MAPE 15.8%; ICC 0.47 (poor reliability)
Doherty et al., 2024 — umbrella6	Consumer wearables, pooled	Overestimated VO₂ max by ±9.83% during exercise tests and ±15.24% at rest

Two of those say your watch reads low. One says it reads high. Caserman’s team explains the contradiction: the models regress toward the mean, flattering unfit users and shortchanging very fit ones.⁵ A separate umbrella review, led by Cailbhe Doherty at University College Dublin, found that only about 11% of released consumer devices have been validated for even one biometric.⁶

The practical rule: read your watch’s number as a band roughly ±6 ml/kg/min wide, and pay attention to its direction of travel rather than its absolute value. A watch that is consistently wrong in the same direction is still a perfectly good trend instrument. We go deeper on that distinction in our guide to what a sudden smartwatch VO₂ max drop actually means.

This is also why SensAI treats a wearable VO₂ max estimate as one signal among many rather than a score to train against. Your resting heart rate trend, your sleep, and how your last four sessions actually felt carry more usable information than a second-decimal change in an inferred number.

Why the men’s and women’s charts are different

Men’s treadmill CRF in the registry averages 26% — 6.6 ml/kg/min — higher than women’s.¹ The usual explanation, “more muscle mass,” is incomplete.

A 2022 experiment in Cardiovascular Research got closer. Candela Diaz-Canestro and David Montero, MD, PhD, of the Libin Cardiovascular Institute of Alberta at the University of Calgary, took 60 age- and activity-matched adults. Before intervention, VO₂peak was 30.8 ± 7.5 ml/kg/min in women and 35.6 ± 8.7 in men.⁷

Then they experimentally matched the men’s blood volume and oxygen-carrying capacity to the women’s. The difference vanished: 30.8 ± 7.5 versus 29.7 ± 7.4, p = 0.551.⁷

The sex gap on these charts is substantially a blood gap — total blood volume and haemoglobin mass — not a motivation gap or a training gap. Which is exactly why you compare yourself down your own column.

How fast does VO₂ max actually decline? Two answers

Cross-sectional data says roughly 13.5% per decade, or about 4.0 ml/kg/min, averaged across six decades of the treadmill cohort.¹ Most articles quote something near 10% from the older tables.²

Longitudinal data says something more useful. Jerome Fleg, MD, of the National Institutes of Health, followed healthy adults in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging for a median of 7.9 years and found the decline is not a constant slope at all. It runs 3–6% per decade in the 20s and 30s, then exceeds 20% per decade past 70 — and it steepens in men from the 40s onward.⁸

That finding held after indexing to fat-free mass, and it held across every quartile of physical activity.⁸

Both figures are correct; they answer different questions. A cross-sectional average tells you where the median person your age sits. It hides the fact that the curve gets steeper under you. If you’re 35 and using “10% a decade” to plan the next thirty years, you’re planning against the wrong shape. The mechanism behind that curve — and what the Fick equation can and can’t explain about it — is worth a read in our breakdown of age-related VO₂ max decline.

The per-kilogram problem

VO₂ max in ml/kg/min divides oxygen uptake by bodyweight. That’s convenient and it’s how every chart on this page is built. It’s also systematically unfair to larger people.

Nevill and colleagues — working with FRIEND’s own data and alongside Kaminsky — showed that a multiplicative allometric model fits the reference data better than the linear per-kilogram one. Their key point: absolute VO₂ max in litres per minute scales with body mass at roughly M^0.67, so dividing by mass over-scales, leaving the per-kilogram number still falling with size (proportional to M^−0.33).⁹

In plain terms: two people with identical cardiovascular capacity, one 20 kg heavier, will not show the same per-kilogram number, and the heavier one is penalized beyond what physiology justifies. If you’re a heavier reader sitting at the 35th percentile, some of that gap is arithmetic rather than aerobic. It’s the same measurement trap that shows up in any bodyweight-relative standard.

What a low number actually costs

This is where the chart stops being trivia.

The American Heart Association issued a scientific statement in 2016, led by Robert Ross, PhD, of Queen’s University, making the case that cardiorespiratory fitness should be measured as a clinical vital sign — arguing it is a potentially stronger predictor of mortality than established risk factors such as smoking, hypertension, high cholesterol, and type 2 diabetes, and that it improves risk reclassification when added to standard models.¹⁰

The supporting numbers:

• Per 1 MET (3.5 ml/kg/min) of higher fitness, all-cause mortality risk falls about 13% (RR 0.87, 95% CI 0.84–0.90) and coronary/cardiovascular events about 15% (RR 0.85, 0.82–0.88). From a meta-analysis of 33 studies and 102,980 participants.¹¹
• Across 122,007 patients undergoing treadmill testing at the Cleveland Clinic, being below-average versus above-average in fitness carried an adjusted hazard ratio of 1.41 — statistically indistinguishable from the risk carried by smoking (1.41) or diabetes (1.40). Low versus elite fitness: HR 5.04. The study found no upper limit to the benefit.¹²
• A 2024 umbrella review spanning 199 cohort studies and over 20.9 million observations put high versus low CRF at HR 0.47 for all-cause mortality and HR 0.31 for incident heart failure.¹³

One MET is 3.5 ml/kg/min. Look back at the tables: for a 50-year-old man, moving from the 30th to the 50th percentile is 4.7 ml/kg/min. That is more than a MET. It is a real, measurable change in risk, and it is achievable.

Can you actually move your percentile?

Yes — but not by a predictable amount, and that unpredictability is itself well documented.

The HERITAGE Family Study put 481 sedentary adults from 98 families through 20 weeks of identical, standardized, supervised training. Mean improvement was around 400 ml/min. The range ran from essentially zero to over 1,000 ml/min. Variance between families was 2.5 times the variance within them, and the maximal heritability of the training response came out at 47%.¹⁴ Claude Bouchard’s team had found that trainability itself is partly inherited.

So the honest framing is: training will almost certainly move your number, and how far it moves is roughly half genetics.

On what training: a meta-analysis of 53 randomised controlled trials found that even short-interval (≤30 s), low-volume (≤5 min), short-term (≤4 week) HIIT beat control by SMD 0.79–1.65, with longer-interval, higher-volume programmes producing larger effects still (SMD 0.50–2.48). Against moderate continuous training, long-interval (≥2 min), higher-volume programmes run for 4–12 weeks came out ahead by SMD 0.65–1.07.¹⁵ In older adults specifically, HIIT beat moderate continuous training by a weighted mean difference of +1.74 ml/kg/min (95% CI 0.80–2.69).¹⁶

That last number matters more than it looks. It says the curve Fleg described is not a sentence. If you’re 65 and sitting at the 30th percentile, the intervention still works. Our comparison of HIIT and Zone 2 work covers how to split the two without wrecking your recovery.

Where SensAI fits: the app reads your connected wearable data — heart rate, sleep, HRV, session history — and adjusts what you do next, rather than handing you a fixed 12-week block and hoping your life cooperates. The evidence says the intensity distribution matters and that individual response varies enormously. That’s precisely the problem an adaptive plan is for.

What “low” actually looks like

Abstractions are easy to shrug off, so here’s a concrete anchor. FRIEND published a companion set of reference standards for adults with diagnosed cardiovascular disease. Treadmill 50th percentiles:¹⁷

Age	Men with CVD	Women with CVD
40–49	25.0	18.2
50–59	23.0	17.5
60–69	21.4	17.3
70–79	18.3	16.0

A 55-year-old man with established cardiovascular disease sits, on median, at about 23 ml/kg/min. On the healthy chart for his decade, that lands between the 20th and 30th percentile.

Read that in both directions. A healthy adult down at the 20th percentile has the aerobic capacity of the median cardiac patient. And a cardiac patient at the 75th percentile of his chart is out-performing plenty of healthy peers.

Frequently asked questions

Is a VO₂ max of 40 good?

It depends entirely on age and sex. For a 25-year-old man, 40 sits around the 30th percentile — below average. For a 55-year-old woman, 40 is above the 90th percentile. For a 45-year-old man it’s around the 70th.¹

What is a good VO₂ max for a 40-year-old man?

The 50th percentile is 35.3 ml/kg/min. Above 45.2 puts you in the top 20% of your decade; above 50.8 puts you in the top 10%.¹

What is a good VO₂ max for a 40-year-old woman?

The 50th percentile is 25.7 ml/kg/min. 33.0 is the 80th percentile and 37.8 the 90th. Across all ages, “good” for a woman means clearing her own decade’s median — 36.6 at 20–29, 28.3 at 30–39, 22.9 at 50–59, 19.6 at 60–69.¹

What is a good VO₂ max for a 50-year-old?

For a man in the 50–59 band the 50th percentile is 29.2 ml/kg/min; 38.3 is the 80th and 43.4 the 90th. For a woman, the 50th percentile is 22.9, the 80th 28.4, and the 90th 32.4.¹

What VO₂ max counts as elite?

The registry’s 90th percentile is the top of this chart — 58.6 for a man in his 20s, 49.0 for a woman.¹ FRIEND is a clinical and research registry, not an athlete database, so it has no elite band. If you’re above the 90th percentile for your decade, the chart has simply run out of room to rank you.

Is my Apple Watch VO₂ max accurate?

Not accurate enough to place you precisely on this chart. Validation studies report mean errors around 6 ml/kg/min and MAPE between 13% and 16%, with poor test-retest reliability (ICC 0.47 in one study).⁴⁵ Pooled across devices, wearables have also been found to overestimate by around 10% during exercise testing.⁶ Use the trend, not the digit.

Why is my VO₂ max lower than my friend’s if we train the same?

Three likely reasons, all on this page: sex — the gap is largely blood volume and haemoglobin mass, not effort⁷, bodyweight — per-kilogram scaling over-penalises heavier people⁹, and genetics — trainability is roughly 47% heritable¹⁴.

How much does VO₂ max drop per decade?

Cross-sectionally, about 13.5% per decade averaged over six decades.¹ Longitudinally, the decline accelerates — 3–6% per decade in your 20s and 30s, over 20% per decade past 70.⁸

Should I get a real VO₂ max test?

If you want to know where you actually sit on these charts, yes — a lab CPET is the only way. For most people, tracking the direction of a wearable estimate alongside resting heart rate and session quality is enough to know whether training is working.

Use the chart as a starting position, not a verdict

Your percentile is a snapshot of one trait, taken with an instrument that is probably imprecise, against a reference sample that isn’t quite a population, using a scaling method that mildly misrepresents heavier bodies.

It is still one of the most useful numbers you can know about yourself. Fitness at the below-average end carries risk on the order of smoking.¹² Moving one percentile band is often a single MET, and a single MET is roughly 13% off all-cause mortality risk.¹¹

Find your row. Note the number. Then stop looking at it and go train — and let something that reads your recovery decide how hard. That’s the loop SensAI is built around: measure, adapt, repeat, with the plan bending to the data instead of the other way round.

For the rest of the reference series, see our charts for maximum heart rate by age and push-up norms by age and sex.

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References

Footnotes

1. Kaminsky LA, Arena R, Myers J, Peterman JE, Bonikowske AR, Harber MP, Medina Inojosa JR, Lavie CJ, Squires RW. “Updated Reference Standards for Cardiorespiratory Fitness Measured with Cardiopulmonary Exercise Testing: Data from the Fitness Registry and the Importance of Exercise National Database (FRIEND).” Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 2022;97(2):285-293. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34809986/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷ ↩¹⁸ ↩¹⁹

2. Kaminsky LA, Arena R, Myers J. “Reference Standards for Cardiorespiratory Fitness Measured With Cardiopulmonary Exercise Testing: Data From the Fitness Registry and the Importance of Exercise National Database.” Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 2015;90(11):1515-1523. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26455884/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Peterman JE, Arena R, Myers J, Marzolini S, Ross R, Lavie CJ, Wisløff U, Stensvold D, Kaminsky LA. “Development of Global Reference Standards for Directly Measured Cardiorespiratory Fitness: A Report From the Fitness Registry and Importance of Exercise National Database (FRIEND).” Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 2020;95(2):255-264. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31883698/ ↩

4. Lambe R, O’Grady B, Baldwin M, Doherty C. “Investigating the accuracy of Apple Watch VO2 max measurements: A validation study.” PLoS ONE, 2025;20(5):e0323741. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40373042/ ↩ ↩²

5. Caserman P, Yum S, Göbel S, Reif A, Matura S. “Assessing the Accuracy of Smartwatch-Based Estimation of Maximum Oxygen Uptake Using the Apple Watch Series 7: Validation Study.” JMIR Biomedical Engineering, 2024;9:e59459. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39083800/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. Doherty C, Baldwin M, Keogh A, Caulfield B, Argent R. “Keeping Pace with Wearables: A Living Umbrella Review of Systematic Reviews Evaluating the Accuracy of Consumer Wearable Technologies in Health Measurement.” Sports Medicine, 2024;54(11):2907-2926. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39080098/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

7. Diaz-Canestro C, Pentz B, Sehgal A, Montero D. “Sex differences in cardiorespiratory fitness are explained by blood volume and oxygen carrying capacity.” Cardiovascular Research, 2022;118(1):334-343. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33538810/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

8. Fleg JL, Morrell CH, Bos AG, Brant LJ, Talbot LA, Wright JG, Lakatta EG. “Accelerated longitudinal decline of aerobic capacity in healthy older adults.” Circulation, 2005;112(5):674-682. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16043637/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

9. Nevill AM, Myers J, Kaminsky LA, Arena R. “Improving reference equations for cardiorespiratory fitness using multiplicative allometric rather than additive linear models: Data from the Fitness Registry and the Importance of Exercise National Database Registry.” Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases, 2019;62(6):515-521. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31759954/ ↩ ↩²

10. Ross R, Blair SN, Arena R, Church TS, Després JP, Franklin BA, Haskell WL, Kaminsky LA, Levine BD, Lavie CJ, Myers J, Niebauer J, Sallis R, Sawada SS, Sui X, Wisløff U. “Importance of Assessing Cardiorespiratory Fitness in Clinical Practice: A Case for Fitness as a Clinical Vital Sign: A Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association.” Circulation, 2016;134(24):e653-e699. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27881567/ ↩

11. Kodama S, Saito K, Tanaka S, Maki M, Yachi Y, Asumi M, Sugawara A, Totsuka K, Shimano H, Ohashi Y, Yamada N, Sone H. “Cardiorespiratory fitness as a quantitative predictor of all-cause mortality and cardiovascular events in healthy men and women: a meta-analysis.” JAMA, 2009;301(19):2024-2035. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19454641/ ↩ ↩²

12. Mandsager K, Harb S, Cremer P, Phelan D, Nissen SE, Jaber W. “Association of Cardiorespiratory Fitness With Long-term Mortality Among Adults Undergoing Exercise Treadmill Testing.” JAMA Network Open, 2018;1(6):e183605. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30646252/ ↩ ↩²

13. Lang JJ, Prince SA, Merucci K, Cadenas-Sanchez C, Chaput JP, Fraser BJ, Manyanga T, McGrath R, Ortega FB, Singh B, Tomkinson GR. “Cardiorespiratory fitness is a strong and consistent predictor of morbidity and mortality among adults: an overview of meta-analyses representing over 20.9 million observations from 199 unique cohort studies.” British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2024;58(10):556-566. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38599681/ ↩

14. Bouchard C, An P, Rice T, Skinner JS, Wilmore JH, Gagnon J, Pérusse L, Leon AS, Rao DC. “Familial aggregation of VO2max response to exercise training: results from the HERITAGE Family Study.” Journal of Applied Physiology, 1999;87(3):1003-1008. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10484570/ ↩ ↩²

15. Wen D, Utesch T, Wu J, Robertson S, Liu J, Hu G, Chen H. “Effects of different protocols of high intensity interval training for VO2max improvements in adults: A meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials.” Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, 2019;22(8):941-947. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30733142/ ↩

16. Wu ZJ, Wang ZY, Gao HE, Zhou XF, Li FH. “Impact of high-intensity interval training on cardiorespiratory fitness, body composition, physical fitness, and metabolic parameters in older adults: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.” Experimental Gerontology, 2021;150:111345. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33836261/ ↩

17. Peterman JE, Arena R, Myers J, Marzolini S, Ades PA, Savage PD, Lavie CJ, Kaminsky LA. “Reference Standards for Cardiorespiratory Fitness by Cardiovascular Disease Category and Testing Modality: Data From FRIEND.” Journal of the American Heart Association, 2021;10(22):e022336. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34747182/ ↩