The Most Reliable Indicator of Wellbeing.
Signs of health so strong, you can forget the labs.
Modern Medicine Has a Problem
The pillar of treatment in modern medicine is diagnostic testing.
These include blood labs, imaging, and biopsies.
Modern medicine excels at identifying specific (real or imagined) diseases through targeted diagnostic testing. These tests are designed to answer a very narrow question: What is it about this condition that uniquely confirms its presence?
That level of specificity is crucial in acute care and emergencies.
However, in the broader context of health and disease prevention, it often yields low returns.
Why? Because what these tests are looking for is often so specific that they tell us little about the overall health of the person and how best to improve it. The signal may be accurate, but it’s often too narrow, too reactive, and too costly to justify chasing in every context.
Instead of focusing solely on identifying a single derangement in the system, a more impactful strategy is to improve the system as a whole. The goal isn’t just to detect illness—it’s to cultivate health: fewer symptoms, more vitality, and a longer, more vital life.
And so, we must ask: are there broader foundational indicators of wellbeing that are accessible, low risk, and capable of improving outcomes across many conditions?
The answer is yes—and it starts with recognizing simple, non-specific signs of health that reflect the deep interconnectivity of the body’s systems. They may not point to a particular disease, but they point powerfully toward something better: improvement and sustained health.
Why Feeling Good Is a Better Predictor of Health Than Lab Tests
One of the most potent predictors of health, vitality, and longevity is VO₂ max. Longevity experts talk about it constantly—and for good reason. But let’s look at it from another angle.
When most people think about optimizing their health, they usually consider adding something: a supplement, an injection, a special diet, or some external intervention. It’s always something done to the body.
But VO₂ max is interesting because it’s not an intervention—it’s an expression of something deeper. As Peter Attia and others have noted, it’s a global indicator of the body’s integrated function.
What does it tell us?
VO₂ max reflects two critical capacities:
Tolerance for acute, high-amplitude stress. People with high VO₂ max may recover from injury faster. They are relatively strong for their size and muscle mass.
Endurance. Higher VO₂ max correlates with better endurance—the ability to maintain effort over time. Whether that’s running, cycling, or managing life’s constant demands.
You may clump these together as resilience. I’m not set on it.
In this way, VO₂ max reveals both vitality and what might be better termed endurance. It’s not just about being energetic or extroverted. It’s about having a stable, adaptable baseline—manifesting in heart rate, breathing, posture, and mood.
A person with high VO₂ max feels good and adapts well. It’s a living sign of functional harmony.
This supports a broader way of thinking about health. Longevity is essentially one long endurance event—life itself. The more we can “train” for it, the more we endure. And just like physical endurance, physiological resilience determines how close we can get to our genetic limits.
How to Track and Improve Your VO₂ Max
VO₂ max can be tracked and improved with simple tools and methods.
An excellent demonstration of how to test your VO₂ max can be found here. You don’t need fancy equipment—a flat treadmill and a good sense of your fastest sustainable walking speed is enough. Adjust the speed to what feels like your fastest walking pace and sustain it for the same length of time used in the test. This simple test can provide a useful estimate of your current cardiovascular fitness.
A strategy to improve VO₂ max, can be found in this video.
Beyond cardio exercises, practices like yoga also contribute to improving VO₂ max. Though this article refers to it as a “mind-body” phenomenon, yoga is a substantial physical workout that helps increase cardiovascular fitness. It requires focused engagement of multiple muscle groups, improving breathing patterns and endurance.
Yoga’s Impact Beyond Fitness
Yoga’s benefits extend beyond improved cardiovascular fitness to meaningful clinical outcomes, particularly in chronic inflammatory conditions - the root of countless diseases. For example, in patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA), yoga has been shown to reduce inflammatory markers and subjective measures of disease severity. Also, it significantly alleviates co-morbid depression—common in chronic illness.
This dual effect on inflammation and mental health demonstrates how interventions that cultivate vitality and systemic balance can transform chronic disease management, not just control symptoms.
This is why how you feel should be a priority.
Why Lab Tests Fall Short
VO₂ max is not a diagnostic test. It doesn’t point to a specific disease or suggest a particular treatment. It reflects overall fitness—achieved through regular activity, not through pharmacological or surgical intervention.
So what’s the real question behind VO₂ max?
How do you feel? How do you feel at rest? Under stress? Over time?
That’s the hidden power of VO₂ max: it correlates strongly with vitality and resilience, and that matters more than any biomarker.
Too often, patients come in feeling terrible, while their labs and imaging appear “normal.”
If someone says, “I don’t feel well,” that alone is a meaningful finding.
More than that.
It’s a guiding light.
Vitality as the Core Indicator of Health
Vitality is not just about feeling “good” emotionally—it’s a physiological state of vibrance and adaptability. If your cardiovascular, metabolic, neurological, and spiritual systems are balanced, you are healthy.
This is more informative than any test.
Pathologies like ossification, calcification, sclerosis or plaque are interpreted as inherently bad. But, they’re often adaptive responses to stress. A bone becomes denser (sclerotic in MSK language) because it’s under stress. In some cases in the form of physical pressure by pushing or pulling. On the other hand, arterial plaque serves sealing or protective function in a vessel under disproportionate mechanical, chemical or electromagnetic stress.
So when we see atherosclerosis, the concern should not be the elevated blood lipids.
This is already too far along down the causal chain.
Worse, it can be costly financially and with respect to your overall health.
The concern should be why is it depositing in these locations?
These are targeted, localized adaptations—not system-wide failures. And the fact that fats/lipids are used in skin and gut healing shows that it has reparative roles.
What we mistake for pathology may be the body’s attempt to survive.
Fear not. There are ways to target disease manifestations at the root without exposing yourself to countless manmade “solutions.”
Towards Foundational Health
Diagnostics have their place—especially in acute care and precise targeting.
But to truly shift health outcomes, we must broaden our lens.
Tracking and improving indicators like VO₂ max, understanding vitality as a whole-body phenomenon, and respecting the body’s adaptive responses is the way to cultivating lasting health.
First and foremost—prioritize the things which improve vitality and longevity.
You must.
Otherwise, you can no longer claim you're truly intent on improving your health.
It doesn't matter how many things you measure, or how much money you spend.
These are the things that move the needle the most.
When we focus on cultivating health, rather than just hunting disease, we reframe the entire medical project.
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Great article. Exactly why I quit going to conventional medical doctors. All they do is look for a reason run more tests and give me a bunch of pills. God gave me a perfectly designed body; my job is to follow His plan for maintaining that body until He calls me home.
I will have to get a measure of VO2max to see how good a job I am doing.
All the diagnostic testing and diagnosing just amplify the signs and symptoms, but the tests do not find the cause nor do they find the cure. No, these tests are to scare you into buying more interventions such as drugs and surgery. After all, what is the bottom line? However, if you feel good you do not have signs and symptoms and therefore there is nothing to diagnose .