There's no need to count steps if you do this...

Hey there my friend,

I’ve been seeing a lot of push towards “getting your steps in” from fitness influencers, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how to explain it to you.

We know that the greatest predictor of your longevity is your VO2 max. That’s the maximum volume of oxygen your body can utilize during stress.

VO₂ max is your body’s “aerobic engine size”—how effectively your heart, lungs, blood, and muscles deliver and use oxygen during intense exercise.

For longevity: a higher VO₂ max means more physical reserve. As fitness naturally declines with age, starting higher helps you remain independent and resilient longer. Higher VO₂ max is strongly associated with lower risk of cardiovascular disease and premature death.

To sum it up: VO₂ max measures how well your body uses oxygen. The higher it is, the more capacity you have to handle physical stress, illness, and aging—and the better your odds of living longer and staying capable.

If you’ve been fairly sedentary for years, and you’re carrying around a lot of extra weight, walking will be strenuous enough as you initially drop weight. But make no mistake, that will become easy at some point, and you’ll have to increase your heart rate during exercise in order to continue to drop weight.

Fat loss and VO2 max become a function of how much stress you place on your bod, over time. Not just minutes per day of time, but months and years of the same intensity level. Our bodies seek out homeostasis, and therefore plateau at a certain weight. This is what we want, and how we maintain a given body composition and fitness level.

So why am I bashing on walking? Well, I’m not, until it’s too easy for you. At that point, hitting some step count just takes more time without producing more fitness.

Here are the facts:

Fact: cardio improves VO2 max.

Fact: the more cardio you do, the higher your VO2 max.

Fact: the higher your VO2 max, the higher your zone 2 heart rate will be (mine is 157-167bpm).

Fact: the higher your zone 2 is, the more fat you will burn at higher heart rates before you peak and only burn carbs (my peak is 175bpm).

Fact: the more fat your bod burns, the leaner you’ll be.

This means that if you only walk, and never make your heart beat harder to improve VO2 max, you will keep a ceiling on improving it, and you’ll only ever be so fit, and only improve longevity to that extent. So you see, we want to keep pushing up our heart rates in consistent, repeatable and challenging ways.

Having measured my VO2 max with a test a few weeks ago, it calculated my biological age as being 19 years old because my VO2 max is in the 93-97th percentile for a 50 year old female. That’s after quite a while of under training because I was using the calculations to guesstimate at my zone 2 training. My VO2 max can improve in the next few months just by training in the correct zone, now that I know for sure what it is.

All I want to do is hang onto that VO2 max, and I’m confident that if I ever got pneumonia or bronchitis, I won’t have any trouble getting over it. But the reality is, I’m unlikely to get it in the first place. That relates back to immunity. The better your fitness, the better your immune system tends to be. Lifting weights is important, and is not a replacement for cardio, just like walking isn’t either.

The best investment you can make is in a chest strap heart rate monitor and use it to train. Watches and bands are fine, but not as accurate as a triangulated sensor right at your heart. I’ve come to no longer care about my total calories burned during the day, so I don’t need my heart rate measured all day long.

**A note about resting heart rate. We don’t really need to know what that is, because the only way to influence it is by improving VO2 max, so we don’t need it measured while we sleep.

I hope this helps you understand the debate of step count vs. cardio. Cardio wins all day, every day.

In great health,

Alli 💋