Long story ahead, I have a hard time just giving a brief summary of this journey of mine!
I've been working out with Fitness Blender for - wow - about 11 years now! I took about a 2-year break from them starting in 2023. After gaining quite a bit of weight on my honeymoon, and not losing any of it after a month of working out regularly and eating pretty decently lean & clean, I lost motivation and gave up working out. Then I moved, and packing and unpacking took so much energy that I didn't feel up to working out. Then I was just. lazy. for several more months.
At the beginning of 2024, I joined a weight loss research study with a major university in my state. They wanted to see how the body - including fat and muscle tissue - change after weight loss. The study has two groups: one group that exercises while dieting, and a control group that loses the weight only through diet. I was thankfully put in the exercise group, which was the experimental group. My exercise was very consistent: 30 minutes per day, 4 days per week of LISS cardio, wherein I kept my heart rate at about 75% of my maximum.
They had me take three VO2 Max tests: one at the beginning for my base level, one right after I reached their target goal of 10% weight loss, and a third six months later. For those that don't know: for this test, they had a mask over my face that collected my breath while I exercised on a treadmill. By steadily increasing both the speed and the incline of the treadmill, they pushed me to the absolute maximum that my breath and heart rate were able to handle. They knew I reached my maximum when my heart rate plateaued for a minute instead of continuing to climb. I unfortunately only have the heart rate data from my third and final test, but they did share my VO2 Max numbers with me.
During the six months it took me to lose the 10% target weight, I really missed Fitness Blender. It was six months of watching TV while I used my exercise bike. Yes, because I was monitoring my heart rate I did still get in a good calorie burn, with a decent amount of huffing and puffing and sweating. But I definitely got bored, even though I switched up the shows I was watching.
So as soon as I hit my target weight loss and took the second VO2 Max test, I went back to Fitness Blender for my workouts. I mostly worked out 3 days per week, sometimes 4. I relished in doing squats again! Weight training has always been my favorite way to exercise, so I was really happy to get back to it. For the last month or so leading up to my last VO2 Max test, I started focusing more on HIIT videos. I remembered how awful the previous tests were, the way I was gasping for breath by the end of them, and my breath catching for several hours afterwards. I wanted to be more used to more intense cardio.
The third VO2 Max test came, and by golly if it didn't feel easier than the first two! I mean, it was still SUPER intense. I had to hold on to the treadmill bars for fear of falling off, they had my short little legs at such a steep incline and high speed. So it still sucked. But still, I wasn't pointing at the "15/20 very exhausted" on the chart they handed me every minute until closer to the end! And then I got my results, and I was absolutely AMAZED!
The scale they used, with values adjusted for sex and age range, goes Very Poor - Poor - Fair - Good - Excellent - Superior. mL/kg/minute means how many milliliters of oxygen my body processed per kilogram that I weighed per minute.
Visit 1. 3/26/24, baseline: 22.3 mL/kg/min: considered Very Poor for a woman my age (as in, below the chart, seems like I shouldn't have been able to survive my first test lol)
Visit 2, 8/16/24, right after losing 10% bodyweight via LISS cardio: 26.8 mL/kg/min: considered Poor for a woman my age (right at the top of Poor, 0.2 units away from Fair!)
Visit 3, 3/6/25, after 6 months of FB workouts with plenty of HIIT: 32.8 mL/kg/min: considered Good for a woman my age! (right in the middle of the Good range!)
While six months of LISS cardio training improved my VO2 Max by 4.5 units and was undeniably good for me, six months of varied training with FB's strength, HIIT, and a few LISS workouts of my own thrown in increased my VO2 Max by even more - 6 units!
In addition to these measures of health that are a bit harder to get on my own, my waist size has steadily dropped. It dropped 2.5 cm during the active phase of the study; 8.7 cm in the six months between my 2nd and 3rd test; and another 5.5 cm in the past 5 months when I've continued my FB training!
I'm so, so grateful to the FB team for continuing to make new content and supporting old content. Now that it's been another 5 months since my last VO2 Max test, I'm feeling stronger than ever! I am super motivated to continue working out regularly, even though the number on my scale hasn't really decreased in months. By taking my waist, bust, and hip measurements, I know that my weight is stagnating simply because of how much muscle I'm building while burning fat!
FB helped me improve my VO2 Max!
Long story ahead, I have a hard time just giving a brief summary of this journey of mine!
I've been working out with Fitness Blender for - wow - about 11 years now! I took about a 2-year break from them starting in 2023. After gaining quite a bit of weight on my honeymoon, and not losing any of it after a month of working out regularly and eating pretty decently lean & clean, I lost motivation and gave up working out. Then I moved, and packing and unpacking took so much energy that I didn't feel up to working out. Then I was just. lazy. for several more months.
At the beginning of 2024, I joined a weight loss research study with a major university in my state. They wanted to see how the body - including fat and muscle tissue - change after weight loss. The study has two groups: one group that exercises while dieting, and a control group that loses the weight only through diet. I was thankfully put in the exercise group, which was the experimental group. My exercise was very consistent: 30 minutes per day, 4 days per week of LISS cardio, wherein I kept my heart rate at about 75% of my maximum.
They had me take three VO2 Max tests: one at the beginning for my base level, one right after I reached their target goal of 10% weight loss, and a third six months later. For those that don't know: for this test, they had a mask over my face that collected my breath while I exercised on a treadmill. By steadily increasing both the speed and the incline of the treadmill, they pushed me to the absolute maximum that my breath and heart rate were able to handle. They knew I reached my maximum when my heart rate plateaued for a minute instead of continuing to climb. I unfortunately only have the heart rate data from my third and final test, but they did share my VO2 Max numbers with me.
During the six months it took me to lose the 10% target weight, I really missed Fitness Blender. It was six months of watching TV while I used my exercise bike. Yes, because I was monitoring my heart rate I did still get in a good calorie burn, with a decent amount of huffing and puffing and sweating. But I definitely got bored, even though I switched up the shows I was watching.
So as soon as I hit my target weight loss and took the second VO2 Max test, I went back to Fitness Blender for my workouts. I mostly worked out 3 days per week, sometimes 4. I relished in doing squats again! Weight training has always been my favorite way to exercise, so I was really happy to get back to it. For the last month or so leading up to my last VO2 Max test, I started focusing more on HIIT videos. I remembered how awful the previous tests were, the way I was gasping for breath by the end of them, and my breath catching for several hours afterwards. I wanted to be more used to more intense cardio.
The third VO2 Max test came, and by golly if it didn't feel easier than the first two! I mean, it was still SUPER intense. I had to hold on to the treadmill bars for fear of falling off, they had my short little legs at such a steep incline and high speed. So it still sucked. But still, I wasn't pointing at the "15/20 very exhausted" on the chart they handed me every minute until closer to the end! And then I got my results, and I was absolutely AMAZED!
The scale they used, with values adjusted for sex and age range, goes Very Poor - Poor - Fair - Good - Excellent - Superior. mL/kg/minute means how many milliliters of oxygen my body processed per kilogram that I weighed per minute.
Visit 1. 3/26/24, baseline: 22.3 mL/kg/min: considered Very Poor for a woman my age (as in, below the chart, seems like I shouldn't have been able to survive my first test lol)
Visit 2, 8/16/24, right after losing 10% bodyweight via LISS cardio: 26.8 mL/kg/min: considered Poor for a woman my age (right at the top of Poor, 0.2 units away from Fair!)
Visit 3, 3/6/25, after 6 months of FB workouts with plenty of HIIT: 32.8 mL/kg/min: considered Good for a woman my age! (right in the middle of the Good range!)
While six months of LISS cardio training improved my VO2 Max by 4.5 units and was undeniably good for me, six months of varied training with FB's strength, HIIT, and a few LISS workouts of my own thrown in increased my VO2 Max by even more - 6 units!
In addition to these measures of health that are a bit harder to get on my own, my waist size has steadily dropped. It dropped 2.5 cm during the active phase of the study; 8.7 cm in the six months between my 2nd and 3rd test; and another 5.5 cm in the past 5 months when I've continued my FB training!
I'm so, so grateful to the FB team for continuing to make new content and supporting old content. Now that it's been another 5 months since my last VO2 Max test, I'm feeling stronger than ever! I am super motivated to continue working out regularly, even though the number on my scale hasn't really decreased in months. By taking my waist, bust, and hip measurements, I know that my weight is stagnating simply because of how much muscle I'm building while burning fat!