Research update: new publication on the relation between estimated VO2max and real life running performance

Blog post by Marco Altini

Quick announcement as our third paper, titled "Relation Between Estimated Cardiorespiratory Fitness and Running Performance in Free-Living: an Analysis of HRV4Training Data" was accepted for publication at the the International Conference on Biomedical and Health Informatics (BHI 2017).

The analysis discussed in this paper is similar to the one recently highlighted on this blog on VO2max and running performance, showing how estimated VO2max in the app is highly correlated with real life running performance for running distances between the 10km and full marathon, and therefore can be used as an effective proxy to running performance without the need for laboratory tests - at the population level.
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Relation between running performance (racing duration for distances between the 10 km and the full marathon) and estimated V O2max for data collected using the HRV4Training application in unsupervised free-living settings. A moderate to strong inverse relationship is shown independently of running distance. Distributions of V O2max values and running performance are also shown.

​​In this work, we first built laboratory-based VO2max estimation models, including reference VO2max data collected using indirect calorimetry, and then deployed our models in the HRV4Training app. More than 500 users linked the app to Strava and used the VO2max estimation models while running distances between the 10km and the full marathon over a period of 1 to 8 months, hence creating a unique dataset on which to investigate the relation between estimated VO2max and running performance. Big thank you to everyone that contributed to this research and helped moving the field forward.

We will be presenting this work next month. We got extremely positive feedback and an invitation to write a follow up journal paper, so we will probably provide more details later on as we keep adding data and investigate the relation between real life performance and estimated fitness.
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For the ones interested in reading the paper, you can find the full text at this link on Research Gate and follow our updates on the HRV4Training Project page.