Originally Posted by
brianappleby
argh, my responses are lagging your questions.
In response to your post #18
A) Efficiency is trainable in the "untrained" person. That means you can take a fat slob off the couch and get easy gains relatively fast. But you and I are already at our genetic potential in that respect, and we aren't going to get much better no matter how hard we try. This is one reason why fitness gains are so pronounced at the very beginning of training. There is a lot of low hanging fruit that everyone has already picked up by the time they start asking the questions that we're discussing.
This would apply to most of the trainability of VO2 max, as well.
OP, you appear to have a lot of potential to increase your LT, and your VO2 max is not currently your limiter.
As for your question B), the lab told me I was highly inefficient, and needed more oxygen per watt than normal.
This conclusion wouldn't come from comparing LT and VO2 max. It would come from directly comparing oxygen consumption to Watts produced. There a lot of reasons this would be. It could be stroke inefficiency, but factors like thermoregulation (being inadequately cooled, or overweight, eg. From your VO2 max, I wouldn't guess you're overweight, though) will throw that off, too.