PHYS-47 · Principle

Pros ride 25 h a week and have huge VO2max. Should I copy them?

Not on that basis. What separates elites from amateurs does not show what will change you; a comparison of people cannot see training. Your own records steer.

How the body works, agreed across the reviews below; a study entry shows what one experiment measured.

well supported, with open questions namedApplies to every comparison with other athletes: elites, training partners, population normsWell supported — between-person and group estimates need not hold within a person: an individual response is a subject-by-training interaction that one before-after test cannot settle (REF-441), true individual…

Practical Application

Pros ride 25 h a week and have huge VO2max. Should I copy them? Not on that basis. What separates elites from amateurs does not show what will change you; a comparison of people cannot see training. Your own records steer.
What it means for training: steer by the athlete's own repeated benchmark across blocks (SYNTH-42) and forecast from trials in people of the same training status (SYNTH-93).
What it does not mean: that population data is useless: the mean of controlled trials is the best first forecast, because most of one block's spread is noise (REF-1274, PHYS-42); or that elite training is wrong for elites.

Mechanism

Across 888 athletes VO2max explained 65-76% of between-athlete differences in threshold power or speed, but such a cross-section cannot see training (REF-746); U23 cyclists who reached elite level had logged more hours, an observation, not a test of adding hours (REF-501).
In 22 adults critical power and VO2max were tightly related before 8 weeks of training (R² 0.92), yet their changes were not significantly related (R² 0.06; REF-993, a small study).
Adding more people does not shrink the measurement error in one person's response, and the same person may respond differently to the same programme another time, a largely unstudied source (REF-441); only a spread wider than a control group's shows true individual differences (REF-430).

Common misreading

"Champions have trait X, so training X makes champions"; "the group average applies to nobody".

Backs

SYNTH-42 "Between athletes is not within one." · SYNTH-26 "What the fast and the successful did (observational, not causal)." · SYNTH-13 "between athletes, not within one"

Sources

Hecksteden et al. 2015 REF-441 · Paper ↗
Atkinson & Batterham 2015 REF-430 · Paper ↗
Fisher, Medaglia & Jeronimus 2018 · Paper ↗
Adolf & Fried 2019 · Paper ↗