The cardiovascular system has a profound ability to adapt and change when it is repeatedly exposed to moderate to high intensity exercise loads for long durations. In simple terms, it undergoes conditioning. Traditionally VO2max measurements have been used to quantify the effects of conditioning on the cardiovascular system. Before discussing how VO2max increases, it's important to form a distinction between improvements in functional criteria and performance criteria. While the Fick Equation (which states that VO2max is the product of cardiac output and the arteriovenous oxygen concentration difference) tells us where to look for causes in VO2max, it doesn't tell us where to looks for improvements in performance. VO2max is a functional criteria , not a performance criteria, and we need to be careful not to conflate the two. The following example, applied to cars, makes the distinction:
The functional criteria of a car establish how much power its' engine can produce. Period. It says …
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