Comment by smcl
1 month ago
Yeah so I know it's meant to be an estimate, but my experience of it is kinda fucky. I would really love to swap watches with an Olympic athlete (idk if they'd bother with an Apple Watch but bear with me!) and run 10k to see what the VO2 max reading for that exercise was. As I said, I think to me it's some estimate that heavily involves some "average of last N readings from the Apple VO2 max calc" function so even if you time travelled and gave it to Eilish McColgan or Mo Farah they'd be like "ehhh you had quite a good run, fatty - you jumped from 44.3 to 45"
I'm not that bothered of course. For me it's just a fun metric I can attempt to optimise when training.
That experiment might be unfruitful because I assume Apple’s algorithm was not trained on outliers. Very capable athletes might see similarly silly data because they don’t fit well into the bell curve. Maybe.