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Garmin VO2 MAX : Uphill Factor

BergFant
24 days ago

One of the reasons I stopped caring about VO2 MAX estimate in my Garmin Forerunner 955, is because it does not consider uphill as one of the variable while calculating VO2 MAX. Most of my runs are uphill runs, I do my temp / threshold / sprint etc. on uphills (10% to 30+ % gradient) hills, so my pace is never really that high. Believe just based on pace/HR Garmin has my VO2 MAX at mid-fifties. 

Few months back when I had to ditch the hills completely, running on flats and just doing easy runs (still faster than running uphill), VO2 MAX spiked significantly going 60+.

Hoping they add this major factor, which dictates pace / HR and effort to their calculation.

  • 0 24 days ago

    If you log your run as trail run it should handle hill runs. When I do hill runs I always use trail run even if the run is on paved streets.

    Another option if you see that VO2 max is incorrect for trail runs is to use trail run and turn off VO2 max. You can make a copy of the trail run profile and have one without VO2 max and one with so you can alternate depending on the type of run.

  • 0 20 days ago

    Sync your account to runnalyze, it has it's own VO2 calculations, including gradient factor.

  • 0 20 days ago

    The Garmin VO2max estimation does take elevation changes into account, and has done so for many years. However, it requires your run to have long enough segments where the ratio of hr vs grade adjusted pace remains more or less constant. That may be difficult to achieve if the terrain changes a lot (or you are doing sprints), because hr takes a while to catch up. As e7andy wrote, trail running has different parameters which try to help, but that's often not enough.