In “Are You Fit for Your Age?”, Michele Olson, PhD, senior clinical professor of sport science at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama tells Karen Asp of WebMD if you get fit and stay fit, you can have the health of someone 10 to 15 years younger. An algorithm created by researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) to determine your “fitness age,” though, suggests at least one 61-year-old has bettered Olson’s estimate considerably.

According to NTNU’s The Fitness Calculator, I’m as fit as the average 24-year-old male. About a quarter century better than Olson’s estimate.

I’m trying to prove a point here - not puff out my still-not-sagging-albeit-too-small chest - so stay with me. That point being feeling younger and performing better than your age does not occur by accident. It’s the byproduct of a long-term healthy-lifestyle plan.

Though mine has certainly developed a Rube Goldberg quality throughout the years, your plan can stay simple. That’s why today’s title alludes to camel humps rather than VO2 max.

At the NTNU website, VO2 max - the maximum amount of milliliters of oxygen per minute per kilogram of weight your body can use during all-out exercise - is called the “most precise” measure of overall cardiovascular fitness. The Fitness Calculator algorithm uses age, waist circumference, leisure-time physical activity, and resting heart rate to estimate mine at 55.

The expected rate for a male my age is 40.

The difference between those two numbers makes my fitness age 37 years fewer than my actual one - and you should now see where all this information is heading. To an explanation of what I like to call camel-hump workouts and how they slow the inevitable decline of your VO2 max, as well as some of the health benefits that stem from that.

As a result of the HUNT1 and HUNT2 Fitness Studies, NTNU researchers promote a workout design that can be applied to any type of aerobic activity they call 4x4 interval training.

After a 10-minute warmup, you progressively increase your effort for two minutes until you become short of breath. You then maintain a tempo that makes it tough to finish full sentences without gasping for air for two minutes.

A break of about three minutes comes next, but it’s not a full cessation of activity. It’s a decrease in the pace to a rate a bit harder than your warmup to allow you to regulate your breathing and partially recover.

Repeat this hard/easy pattern three more times, finish with a five-minute cool down, and you’ve completed the sort of exercise session NTNU’s researchers have found to hide Father Time’s scythe - and help overweight teens lose weight.

If you visit the NTNU website, you’ll find their explanation of a 4x4 interval training workout uses heart rate figures based on a percentage of your maximum heart rate. My version eliminates that since you may not wear a heart rate monitor during cardiovascular workouts.

But if you were wearing one during such a workout and then downloaded the data, the printout would resemble - you guessed it - four camel humps.

So if you want to keep your aerobic workouts simple, frustrate Father Time, and maybe even shed a few pounds of fat in the process, create those four camel humps in two workouts each week when you run, ride, swim, hike, or walk.

Remember, the key is to increase the intensity to the point where you find it hard to speak and keep up that pace for a fair amount of time. For someone who’s relying on feel rather than using a heart rate monitor, using some sort of watch to time the intervals and the recoveries helps - or you can simply count to 150 twice for the former and to 210 for the latter.

Either way, a steady diet of camel-hump workouts will increase your VO2 max if you haven’t been exercising regularly or decrease its inevitable rate of decline if you have been exercising but only moderately.

The health benefits of doing so are nothing to sneeze at.

What NTNU researchers found by following up on the 37,000 HUNT1 Fitness Study participants through HUNT2 24 years later was a 21-percent decreased risk of dying for cardiovascular disease with each MET increase of 1.

Don’t let MET confuse you. It’s usually used to estimate energy output and caloric burn. A workout that’s 5 METs for you, for instance, requires your body to use about five times as much oxygen than when you are at rest.

Since METs are based on the same formula as VO2 max, my VO2 max score of 55 - as opposed to the expected score of 40 - lowers my risk of dying from cardiovascular disease by 90 percent. Moreover, it also reduces my risk of dementia by 68%.