We connect the (completely bounded) local Coulhon-Varopoulos dimension to the spectral dimension of spectral triples associated to sub-Markovian semigroups (or Dirichlet forms) acting on classical (or noncommutative) L p -spaces associated to finite measure spaces. As a consequence, we are able to prove that a two-sided Gaussian estimate on a heat kernel explicitely determines the spectral dimension. Our simple approach can be used with a large number of examples in various areas: Riemmannian manifolds, Lie groups, sublaplacians, doubling metric measure spaces, elliptic operators and quantum groups, in a unified manner.