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Derived in 343 healthy adults aged 30 to 69. Med Sci Sports Exerc 1987;19:253-9.
Walk one mile as fast as you can, on the flat, without breaking into a run.
32.2 ml/kg/min
Published error puts it between 27.4 and 37.
An estimate for training purposes, not medical advice and not a fitness test. Neither equation measures oxygen: both predict it from a population average, so a person whose economy of movement or heart size is unusual for their group gets a number that is wrong in a direction this page cannot see. Walking a mile as fast as possible raises the heart rate a long way, and anyone with a heart condition, chest pain or an unexplained shortness of breath should be cleared by a doctor before trying it.
The Rockport equation was fitted in 343 healthy adults aged 30 to 69, so nobody in it was younger than 30 or older than 69, and its protocol is a walk — running the mile breaks the assumption the heart-rate term rests on. The heart-rate ratio was fitted in 46 well-trained men aged 21 to 51, and its authors say plainly that its use in any other group awaits direct validation. Both are shown with the error their own papers report rather than as a single confident figure.
Maximal oxygen uptake is the ceiling on how much oxygen your body can take in, move and use during hard work, written in millilitres per kilogram of you per minute. Measuring it properly means a mask, a gas analyser and a protocol ridden or run to genuine exhaustion. Everything on this page is a prediction instead: a regression built by testing one group of people in a laboratory and then finding a simpler thing about them that tracked the result closely enough to be useful.
The one-mile walk comes from Kline and colleagues in 1987 and is usually called the Rockport test. Its equation was fitted in 343 healthy adults aged 30 to 69, and it uses your walk time, the heart rate you finish on, your age, your sex and your body weight. Nobody under 30 or over 69 was in that sample, and the protocol is emphatically a walk — jogging any of the mile breaks the assumption its heart-rate term is built on.
The heart-rate ratio comes from Uth and colleagues in 2004 and needs no test at all: multiply the ratio of your maximum to your resting pulse by 15.3. It was established in 46 well-trained men aged 21 to 51, and those authors wrote that applying it to any other group would have to await direct validation. Trained men is who it describes. That sentence is not fine print, it is the finding.
A 42-year-old woman weighing 68 kg who walks the mile in 15 minutes 30 seconds and finishes at 138 beats per minute gets 32.2 ml/kg/min, or about 9.2 METs of sustainable intensity. The published standard error on that equation is 0.325 litres a minute, which at her body weight is 4.8 ml/kg/min — so the honest reading is somewhere between 27 and 37, and the tool prints that band rather than hiding it behind one decimal place.
Kenneth Cooper published the twelve-minute run in 1968 and it remains the best-known aerobic field test there is. The regression constants everyone quotes for it circulate almost entirely in secondary sources, and this site has a rule against publishing an authoritative-looking figure that cannot be checked against the document it came from. Both equations offered here have their coefficients, sample sizes and errors printed in abstracts anyone can read.
No, and the result is meaningless if you do. The walk equation reads your finishing heart rate as the cost of covering that distance on foot at a walking gait. Running the same mile produces a different relationship between speed and pulse entirely, so the number the equation returns is answering a question you did not ask.
Because the normative tables that turn a number into a word like average or excellent are proprietary, and reproducing one from memory is exactly how invented reference data gets onto a website. The figure in METs is offered instead, which is arithmetic rather than a table, and it compares directly against the intensity of any activity you might do.
It is the same quantity estimated by a different and undisclosed method, usually from the relationship between your pace and your heart rate over many runs. Watch estimates tend to be reasonable at tracking change in one person over months and much less reliable as an absolute figure, which is also true of the two equations here.
Lying still, before getting up, ideally averaged across several mornings. A pulse taken after coffee, after climbing the stairs or while a blood pressure cuff is inflating will be higher, and because the ratio method divides by that number, a resting rate ten beats too high drags the whole estimate down by several points.