Physiological determinants of VO2max and the methods to evaluate it: A critical review

Objectives. - To review the scientific literatures on the main influence factors, test methods, criteria and quantitative methods of VO2max. News. - Ratio scaling is not appropriate to describe the quantitative relationship between VO2max and body mass. Instead, simple allometric model might be better though it is still not perfect enough and more research is necessary to further investment. Prospects and projects. - Such knowledge could help researchers better understand the real quantitative relationship between VO2max and body mass, and help coaches more correctly guild sports practice or evaluate the aerobic capacity of athletes. Conclusion. - 1. Central circulatory factors mainly restrict VO2max when performing an all-round exercise, while peripheral factors might be dominant in regional exercise and can affect central circulatory factors like cardiovascular functions to improve VO2max; 2. The primary factor impacting the precision of the absolute VO2max is the different criteria for defining oxygen uptake plateau, while lacking of the deeper understanding and systematic study of two methods are key to controversy on relative VO2max values for a long time; 3. Simple allometric model is more reasonable to describe the quantitative relationship between VO2max and body mass, but different perspectives, different groups of subjects and different experimental conditions are needed to further investigate b values in order to identify the using conditions and scope of simple allometric model. (C) 2021 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.