What this page does
A VO2 max by age table answers a different question from a VO2 max calculator. The calculator gives you a number; this page tells you what that number is worth for the body that produced it, because the same 50 ml/kg/min is ordinary in a man of 25 and unusual in a man of 65. It takes your age, your sex and your VO2 max, finds the reference band you belong to, and reports where your number sits inside it.
The reference numbers are the published ones: six age bands from 20–29 to 70+, separately for men and women, each with a sample size, a mean and a standard deviation, taken from 3,816 treadmill tests in the HUNT3 fitness study (Loe and colleagues, 2013). Nothing in that table was invented for this page and nothing was rounded to make a nicer story; the twelve rows are transcribed and the citation is below.
No other page on this site does age grading. The VO2 max calculator runs two field-test regressions — a twelve-minute run and a heart-rate ratio — and deliberately refuses to grade the result, because when it was written this site had no source for the cut-points that differ by age and sex. This page is that missing half, and it is built on a source that publishes the bands rather than on one this page made up. Use the calculator to get a number, then come here to read it.
Everything runs in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to a server, there is no account and no upload, and the three values you enter never leave the page.
How the numbers are calculated
Two things go in, and only one of them is transcribed. The first is the reference table: for each of the twelve band-and-sex cells, a mean m and a standard deviation s, in ml/kg/min, exactly as published. The second is the arithmetic that turns your number into a position. Your gap from the band mean is v − m, and the same gap in standard deviations is:
z = (v − m) ÷ s
The percentile is the share of a normal distribution that falls below z:
percentile = 100 × Φ(z)
where Φ is the standard normal cumulative distribution, evaluated in the page with the Abramowitz and Stegun 7.1.26 approximation of the error function — accurate to about 1.5 × 10−7, which is far finer than a percentile printed to a whole number needs.
A worked example: a man of 45 at 50.0 ml/kg/min
45 falls in the 40–49 band, where the published figures for men are m = 47.2 and s = 7.7 (n = 526). The gap is 50.0 − 47.2 = 2.8 ml/kg/min, and z = 2.8 ÷ 7.7 = 0.3636. Φ(0.3636) = 0.6419, so the percentile is 64: about 64% of the men in that band sit below 50.0. The band's one-standard-deviation edges are 47.2 − 7.7 = 39.5 and 47.2 + 7.7 = 54.9.
The same 50.0 read against the 60–69 band (mean 39.2, SD 6.7) gives z = 10.8 ÷ 6.7 = 1.6119 and the 95th percentile; read against 20–29 (mean 54.4, SD 8.4) it gives z = −4.4 ÷ 8.4 = −0.5238 and the 30th. One number, three positions, no change to the number itself. That is the whole point of an age-graded table, and the block above the reading does it for whatever you typed.
Where the reference table comes from
Loe H., Rognmo Ø., Saltin B., Wisløff U. (2013), Aerobic Capacity Reference Data in 3816 Healthy Men and Women 20–90 Years, PLOS ONE 8(5): e64319, DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0064319. The study is open access and the table is its Table 2.
- What was measured: peak oxygen uptake on a treadmill, with a graded protocol to exhaustion and a metabolic cart, on 3,816 people (1,929 men, 1,881 women) aged 20–90 in Norway, collected 2006–2008. People with cancer, cardiovascular disease, obstructive lung disease or blood-pressure medication were excluded, so this is a healthy reference population, not a clinical one.
- What the table holds: a mean and a standard deviation per band and sex, not percentiles. The page turns the mean and SD into a percentile, which is an approximation and is labelled as one below.
- The correction: the paper's Table 2 was corrected in November 2013, because the 50–59 variables had been printed under the 20–29 heading. The twelve means and SDs used here are read from the corrected table.
The twelve bands, and how to read a number against them
The table above is the whole reference set: two sexes, six bands, sample size, mean, standard deviation, and the two one-standard-deviation edges. Read the row for your own band first. The mean is the middle of that population, not a target and not a pass mark; the SD says how wide the middle is. In the 40–49 male band one SD is 7.7 ml/kg/min, so roughly two thirds of that band sits between 39.5 and 54.9 — a range wide enough that two men with visibly different running lives can both be inside it.
Two things the table will show you if you look across the rows rather than at one. First, the bands do not decline evenly: from the published means, men fall 5.3, then 1.9, then 4.2, then 3.8, then 3.9 ml/kg/min per decade across the five steps, averaging 3.82; women fall 3.0, 1.6, 3.7, 3.6 and 2.8, averaging 2.94. Those are differences between group means in a cross-sectional sample, not the decline any one person will experience, and the paper's own cohort is the only place those numbers come from.
Second, the women's bands sit about 11–13 ml/kg/min below the men's at every age in this table, which is why the page asks for sex rather than adjusting one table for the other. Reading a woman's number against the male band is not a stricter test; it is the wrong test.
Why the same number means something different at 25 and at 65
VO2 max falls with age in every population that has been measured, so a table that grades a number without asking how old the person is would call a fit 65-year-old poor and an average 25-year-old good. The adjustment is not a correction applied to your score; it is a change of the group you are compared with. 50.0 ml/kg/min is the 30th percentile of men aged 20–29, the 64th of men aged 40–49, and the 95th of men aged 60–69, and all three statements are true at once because they are answers to three different questions.
That is also why the percentile is not a grade. A percentile says where a number sits among the people in that band; it does not say whether the number is enough for anything in particular. Nothing on this page sets a threshold, because a threshold is a claim about outcomes — mortality, or performance, or readiness for surgery — and this page has no outcome data and makes no such claim.
The practical use is direction, not rank. If you test again in six months, the band will be the same or one decade along, and the percentile tells you whether the number moved relative to people like you. That is the reading this table supports; anything finer needs a lab and a clinician.
Supported range and limits
- Age: 20 to 90 whole years. Below 20 the study has no band; above 90 there is no data. 70 to 90 is one published band, so a 71-year-old and an 89-year-old are read against the same mean and SD.
- Sex: the two bands the source publishes, male and female. The page does not interpolate a third band, because the source has none.
- VO2 max: 10.0 to 90.0 ml/kg/min. The highest value in the source cohort is 76.5, so anything above that is placed against the band but sits outside the range the reference population actually covered.
- Units: ml/kg/min only. The source publishes absolute uptake in L/min as well, but the per-kilogram figure is the one that is comparable between people of different sizes, and mixing the two would produce a meaningless percentile.
- Rounding: the percentile is rounded to a whole number, the gap from the mean to one decimal, z to two. One rounding, at the end, never halfway through the chain.
- Cost: none. No account, no email, no paywall, no daily limit, no request to a server.
- Privacy: every number is computed in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere or stored — reload the page and it is gone.
- Works offline once the page has loaded, and on a phone.
What this page deliberately does not do
- No invented cut-points. The page reports a percentile from a published mean and SD. It does not print “excellent”, “good” or “poor” bands, because those words belong to whichever set of cut-points someone chose, and a label invented here would look like a standard when it is not one.
- No clinical or mortality claim. Nothing here says a percentile predicts anything about health, surgery or lifespan. The source is a reference table for a healthy population, and this page uses it for exactly that.
- No protocol correction. The reference values are treadmill running. A number from a cycle test, a field test or a watch estimate is a different measurement, and this page applies no conversion between them, because a conversion would need its own source.
- No estimate of your VO2 max. The page does not predict a number from a run or a heart rate; it reads a number you already have. That estimate is the VO2 max calculator.
- No race-time prediction. Turning fitness into a finish time needs a running-economy model this page does not have. Predicting a finish time from a race you have actually run is the race time predictor on the home page.
- No training zones. Zone boundaries differ between books, and this page has no source for one set. Pace zones you can actually run are the race pace calculator and the 5K pace calculator.
Questions
What is a good VO2 max for my age?
This page will not use the word good, but it will tell you exactly where a number sits. Among men aged 40–49 the reference mean is 47.2 ml/kg/min with a standard deviation of 7.7, so 50.0 is the 64th percentile of that band; among men aged 60–69 the mean is 39.2 with an SD of 6.7, so the same 50.0 is the 95th. Type your own age, sex and number above and the percentile for your band is the first thing the page prints. Whether that percentile is good enough for a particular purpose is a judgement the table does not make.
How much does VO2 max fall with age?
In this reference data the group means fall by about 3.8 ml/kg/min per decade for men and 2.9 for women, averaged across the five decade steps from 20–29 to 70+. The steps are not even: the men's means drop 5.3 between the first two bands and only 1.9 between the next two. Those are differences between the means of different people measured once, not the decline an individual will follow, and the page prints the twelve means so you can check the arithmetic yourself.
What is the average VO2 max for a 50-year-old man?
43.0 ml/kg/min, with a standard deviation of 7.5, from 709 men in that band. For a woman of the same age the reference figures are 34.7 and 5.7 from 401 women. A 50-year-old man at 43.0 is therefore at the 50th percentile of his band by construction, and the page prints the whole row rather than only the mean so the width of the band is visible.
Where do these reference values come from?
Loe H., Rognmo Ø., Saltin B. and Wisløff U. (2013), Aerobic Capacity Reference Data in 3816 Healthy Men and Women 20–90 Years, PLOS ONE 8(5): e64319, DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0064319. It reports peak oxygen uptake from treadmill tests on 3,816 healthy Norwegian adults aged 20–90, collected between 2006 and 2008. The twelve means and standard deviations on this page are its Table 2, read from the version corrected in November 2013.
Why does the same VO2 max give a different percentile at different ages?
Because the comparison group changes. 50.0 ml/kg/min is the 30th percentile of men aged 20–29, the 64th of men aged 40–49 and the 95th of men aged 60–69. The number did not move; the band did. That is what an age-graded table is for, and the block above the reading shows the same number read against all six bands at once so the effect is visible rather than asserted.
Is a percentile the same as a grade?
No. A percentile says what share of a reference band sits below your number. A grade says a number is good enough for something, and that requires a threshold with an outcome behind it, which this page does not have and does not invent. The page prints no excellent, good or poor labels for that reason, even though a labelled table would be easier to skim.
How exact is a percentile built from a mean and a standard deviation?
It assumes the values in the band are roughly normally distributed around the published mean. The source publishes means and standard deviations, not percentiles, so this page cannot reproduce the true distribution and does not pretend to. Within about one standard deviation of the mean the approximation is close; far out in either tail it is the least reliable, which is exactly where a printed 95th or 5th percentile deserves the most caution.
Can I compare a watch estimate or a lab test to this table?
Only with care. The reference values are treadmill running to exhaustion with a metabolic cart, and a watch estimate, a twelve-minute run regression or a cycle test is a different measurement with its own error. This page applies no correction between protocols, because a correction would need its own published source. If your number came from the VO2 max calculator on this site, treat the percentile as a position for a field estimate, not as a laboratory result.