If you find it difficult to maintain your energy level for everyday tasks, such as an hour-long exercise session, you may attribute it to a lackluster sleep or general tension. Even if those are undoubtedly factors that can deplete your battery, you also need to take your physical endurance into account.
Endurance: What Is It?
To put it simply, physical endurance is the capacity to engage in a certain degree of activity for an extended period of time. The word “endurance” is frequently used to describe athletes, particularly those who participate in sports that demand them to endure physically demanding activities for extended periods of time, such as cross-country skiing, professional soccer, and marathon running. However, not just top athletes require or gain from physical endurance. Every body needs some degree of endurance to get through life, whether you want to take a long stroll with your dog or spend the day at an amusement park with your kids. Furthermore, you may always expand and enhance it.
Muscular endurance and cardiovascular endurance are the two categories of physical endurance.
Heart-Related Endurance
According to fitness instructor and 15-time Ironman triathlete Jen Rulon, “cardiovascular endurance is your body’s capacity to exercise for an extended amount of time, such as running a 5K or attending a spin class.” When your heart and lungs are working together to help your body receive oxygen into your system, you need this kind of endurance to keep going whenever you start an activity.
“Performance in sports and physical activities as well as your everyday life depend on cardiovascular endurance,” says Alex Rothstein, MS, CSCS, coordinator and teacher of the exercise science department at the New York Institute of Technology on Long Island.
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Thus, how can one develop endurance? As one might expect, aerobic activity, or movement, is essential for a number of reasons. According to Rothstein, “[y]ou’ll be able to perform an activity at greater intensities and for longer durations” if you have better endurance. Increasing your cardiovascular endurance can lessen the likelihood that you may experience weariness during an exercise or perhaps stop because you sense a burning feeling.
Your general health can be significantly improved by increasing your cardiovascular endurance. According to Rulon, increased endurance can improve your respiratory and circulatory systems, as well as lower blood pressure and cholesterol.
Strength vs. Endurance
However, keep in mind that stamina and endurance are sometimes confounded. Although they are comparable and linked, stamina encompasses both the psychological and the physiological aspects of sustaining physical exertion, whereas cardiovascular endurance just considers the physiological aspects. According to Rothstein, “stamina is a combination of cardiovascular endurance and the impression of fatigue,” together with the capacity to push past the sensation of exhaustion.
Physical Sturdiness
While muscular endurance is correlated with muscle strength and ability, cardiovascular endurance is mostly tied to your heart. “It is the frequency of weightlifting without fatigue, an essential component for strengthening your heart,” explains Rulon.
It is impossible to discuss muscular endurance without also discussing muscular strength, or the maximal power that can be generated in a single movement. According to Rothstein, “you will grow better at tolerating stress or cardiovascular training” with increased muscle strength and endurance.
How to Increase Your Endurance
It is important to start moving if you wish to develop these two kinds of physical endurance. Cardiovascular or aerobic exercise (such as walking, running, swimming, or cycling) is necessary to develop cardiovascular endurance. However, the manner in which you perform this exercise is important, and here is where the concept of “specific adaptation to imposed demands” (SAID) comes into play. According to the SAID principle, the body will adjust to the unique demands placed upon it. According to Rothstein, “your cardiovascular system needs to be challenged with enough stress to communicate a need to adapt” in order for it to improve cardiovascular endurance.
There are three primary variables you might experiment with to achieve this:
- Frequency: The regularity of your exercise
- Exercise intensity, or how hard you work out
- Duration (length of time spent exercising)
According to Rothstein, altering any one or all of these factors will put your cardiovascular system under different strain and result in distinct responses. For instance, increasing the time of your exercises will tell your body to enhance its ability to burn fat for energy so you can exercise for longer, while higher-intensity exercise may raise your body’s ability to deliver more oxygen and use the supplied oxygen more quickly and efficiently.
Similarly, strength training is necessary to boost muscle endurance; Rulon emphasizes performing more repetitions with smaller weights. To achieve optimal results, the American College of Sports Medicine suggests performing two to three full-body strength workouts per week.
How Much Time Is Needed to Develop Endurance?
How long will it take for you to enhance your physical endurance? It varies from one individual to another, but in general, Rulon believes that if you’re completing three 30-minute workouts a week, you should expect to see increases in cardiovascular endurance in eight to 12 weeks. With physical endurance, several studies demonstrate that there’s improvement after six weeks, she explains.
Continue to Push Your Boundaries to Develop Endurance
Whether you’re training for cardiovascular or muscular endurance, or both, it’s crucial that you’re actually taxing your body and signaling the need for your body to adapt (aka get stronger and be able to withstand that weight and/or activity for longer!). It is also appropriate to make changes again as soon as you adapt—that is, when an activity becomes second nature to you or you cease seeing results. Perhaps you go for longer runs, up the intensity with a few faster sprints at the finish, or increase the frequency of your weekly runs. If not, he says, it is simple to become caught on a plateau.
The Value of Rest and Recuperation
The catch is that it’s also incredibly crucial to achieve a proper balance: Don’t overdo your workout, else you could risk harming yourself, Rothstein adds. After a workout, recovery starts immediately, and that recovery period is critical for developing endurance. According to him, physical activity that incites the body’s desire for adaptation will cause your body to break down and make you temporarily weaker. “You rebuild your strength during the interval of rest and recuperation.”
However, it is a fault because people frequently become so enthused about improving their fitness that they neglect cool-down routines and required rest days. Every week, take at least one day off from organized exercise; if you are new to the gym or engaging in highly intense workouts, you might want to take more time off.
Getting enough sleep is also important for recovery. According to Rulon, “sleep permits your body to heal and rejuvenate itself.” Exercise and sleep quality have been found to be positively correlated, and exercise alone may assist enhance the quality of your sleep, according to Rothstein. Seven to nine hours of sleep per night is the recommended amount of sleep for adults.
