Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Measuring Devices for Fitness Testing are Expensive and Relatively Useless For the Competitive Runner

I ran across some equipment for VO2 Max testing and blood lactate testing kits the other day, which I thought would be interesting to use for my athletes. What coach wouldn't want some really neat testing gear for their runners? I could regularly know exactly where their fitness is with this stuff. Well, lucky for me I happened to look at the price tag of it: VO2 Max testing equipment is right around $6,000 and a device used for blood lactate monitoring is around $230 or more. The obvious thought that came to mind was, is it worth it?

There are a lot of places that do fitness testing on people using this equipment. Hospitals use it for cardiac and pulmonary patients, universities use it for learning purposes mostly, and maybe some athlete testing and research. Sometimes a health club will offer it at an additional cost to their members. A lot of top endurance athletes get it tested on a regular basis, and it has even become a bragging point for Tour de France cyclists that can get theirs around 90 mL/kg. Knowing your VO2 max seems like an important number, but other than patient testing at a hospital, why does being able to know your numbers matter at all when it comes to sports?

Plug in Performances to Find Training Paces, Don't Pay For It!

The VO2 testing equipment basically just measures expired gases during incremental exercise. Once you know your maximal oxygen intake (expressed mL/kg.m), what good does it do for an athlete that can test themselves during a 5k pretty much every weekend? Some may argue that it will help a person train right at their maximal oxygen uptake during intervals or their lactate threshold on a tempo run and get the most effective workouts. I thought about it, and luckily I can plug in race performances in the McMillan or Daniel's Running Calculators and get extremely close to the paces a person should be training at. They already did the math for us competitive people that are looking to improve! That's reason enough to not spend $6,000.

Specific Training Produces Specific Results

Another thought that crossed my mind was the Law of Specificity. To be better at activity, one must perform that activity. If you are training to run a 5k in 20 minutes, piece together workouts that are at 20 minute 5k pace until you can string them together in one race. Training at 5k pace is slower than VO2 Max pace, but it is specific and has been proven to improve performance in well trained runners (link), so again it is basically worthless to know that you have a VO2 max of 60.

Furthermore, if a runner is training for a cross country race, paces often don't matter and the runner will have to train by feel. Hills, mud, grass, and weather will slow the athlete to the point that training specifically at your VO2 max pace will be too taxing. Taking lactate readings every few intervals is somewhat silly too, because who wants their finger pricked every 5 to 10 minutes? The same thing can be accomplished with a heart rate monitor. The heart rate should hover around 85% of max and no finger pricks needed.

Exercise Testing is a $$$ Maker

Thirdly, I see the exercise testing a lot of places as a business opportunity for them. I've seen a lot of places charge clients $75 to $200 per test just to know some numbers. I think if someone is that interested in knowing they have raised their lactate threshold over 12 weeks of training, that's fine, but I'm confident their weekend race performances wouldn't be any worse if they didn't know at all. I think people should further realize that charging that much for a fitness test is often to make up for the cost of the equipment and hopefully be a profit generator. Time over a distance seems to be a perfectly good measurement to me and I don't have to pay for it unless it's just a race fee.

Conclusions

After looking at this stuff, I still think it's neat equipment to have, but have come to the conclusion that if your race performances are improving, workouts are getting easier, and you generally feel good about your fitness, there's no need to get any kind of VO2 Max testing or lactate testing done. Performance improves with progressively specific workouts and you don't have to pay for it.



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