First, your maximum VO2 is the greatest amount of oxygen you can utilize, and is a value that can be influenced …show more content…
You can increase your Cardiac Output by increasing the number of beats-per-minute of the heart. The number of beats-per-minute is referred to as the max heart rate of a person. This is limited by heredity and cannot be influenced with training.
The amount of blood pumped with each beat of the heart is referred as the Stroke Volume. The stroke volume can be greatly influenced by training. Resulting of an increase stroke volume is to increase the amount of oxygen made available to the muscle at any giving time. Increasing stroke volume has the greatest potential for improving endurance-performance. This is the formula:
Max Heart Rate x Stroke Volume = Cardiac Output
Lastly, the arterio-venous oxygen difference is a measure of the amount of oxygen taken up from the blood by the tissues. The greater the amount of oxygen extracted by the tissues, the greater the arterio-venous oxygen difference. During exercise blood flows to the tissue increases, and haemoglobin dissociates more easily; therefore the arterio-venous oxygen difference widens during exercise. With aerobic training the tissues become more efficient at getting oxygen. To calculate this we take the oxygen concentration of arterial blood minus the oxygen concentration of venous blood (deoxygenated