Endurance is more than just surviving a challenging workout. It’s about building a foundation of strength and stamina. Building endurance is vital whether you aim to conquer a marathon or simply feel more energized during the day.
Key Takeaways
- Building endurance is a gradual process that requires consistent exercise, 3-4 times per week, at a moderate intensity.
- Mix up your workouts through cross-training and gradually increase your exercise load by no more than 10% weekly to prevent injury and boost stamina.
- Recovery is crucial. Prioritize sleep, stay hydrated, eat a balanced diet, and listen to your body to prevent burnout and maintain long-term fitness progress.
Endurance is the ability to keep going before fatigue takes over and you have to stop or slow down to recover. It affects how long you can walk, run, swim, cycle, or sustain any fun activity.
Building it isn’t difficult, but it doesn’t happen overnight. It requires patience and consistency. Exercise isn’t fun if you’re constantly struggling to breathe. However, having endurance lets you go the distance. Let’s look at some tips on how to increase your stamina so you can enjoy workout and non-workout activities more.
Stay Consistent
Consistency is critical for success. If you only sporadically exercise, then you won’t work your body enough for it to build endurance. Minimally, you should exercise 3 to 4 times per week for at least 30 minutes of moderate intensity for each workout.
Moderate intensity is the sweet spot for most of your workouts. You can tell if you’re working out at this level if you can speak in complete sentences, but you may need to pause to breathe every few words. You should be able to hold a conversation or a tune, but slightly more effort is involved.
Using a fitness tracker, you can track your heart rate to adjust your effort to keep it between 50% and 70% of your maximum heart rate. You can estimate your maximum heart rate by subtracting your age from 220. For example, a 40-year-old’s maximum heart rate is about 180 beats per minute. So, moderate exercise is between 90 and 126 beats per minute.
Gradually Increase The Workload
Your body adapts quite well to changes. Building endurance requires gradually increasing your workload to improve. Otherwise, you’ll stop progressing toward your fitness goals and maintain your current fitness level. To break through, you’ll need to increase your workload. There are a few ways to do this while minimizing your risk of burnout and injury.
One way is to follow the 10% rule, which states that you should increase your mileage, duration, or resistance by no more than 10% per week. Gradually increasing your workload will prevent overtraining while improving your cardiovascular endurance.
A second way is to do interval training at least once or twice a week, but never without a rest day or low-intensity workout in between. Interval training involves short bursts of high-intensity effort (>70% of your maximum heart rate) with low to moderate-intensity recovery periods. For example, sprinting for 30 seconds with a 1- to 2-minute walk or slow run for recovery. You would repeat intervals many times during a workout. Interval training improves your body’s ability to recover and sustain effort longer.
A third way is to do tempo workouts. Tempo workouts maintain a challenging but sustainable pace for 20 to 40 minutes. Typically, this is done at a high intensity where your heart rate is between 70-80% of its max. The key is not to go all out but to sustain the effort. Tempo workouts help build endurance by improving your aerobic capacity, making maintaining an activity easier.
Maintain A Sustainable Pace
High-intensity training shouldn’t be done for every workout. In fact, the majority of your workouts should be at a moderate intensity that you can sustain. If you’re starting or restarting your fitness journey, it’s easy to be eager and overdo it, making the back half of your workout very uncomfortable.
Working out at a sustainable pace strengthens the heart and improves the body’s ability to deliver oxygen-rich blood to the muscles. Slow, steady training builds fatigue-resistant muscle fibers, which are essential for endurance.
You can keep yourself in the zone in a couple of ways. First, you could use the talk test to maintain a sustainable pace. If you can speak complete sentences without gasping while moving, you’re in a good place to build endurance. Secondly, you can use a fitness tracker to monitor your heart rate throughout your workout. All you have to do is keep your heart rate between 60% and 70% of your maximum heart rate.
Strength Training
Strength training reduces muscle fatigue, allowing you to sustain activity for longer durations. It consists of compound movements that engage multiple muscle groups and joints simultaneously, improving the efficiency of your movement. Additionally, strength training reduces your risk of injury caused by fatigue, poor form, and repetitive strain.
It’s a common misconception that strength training requires lifting weights. Several alternatives exist for those who don’t want to strength train this way.
Bodyweight exercises, such as push-ups, pull-ups, squats, lunges, and planks, use your body weight as resistance. It’s a great way to build muscle endurance and strength with little to no equipment.
Resistance bands provide movement resistance, allowing you to work your muscles effectively. They are elastic bands made of rubber or latex that provide resistance when stretched. They come in various thicknesses, letting you control the level of resistance.
Plyometrics uses explosive movements, such as jump squats and box jumps. It focuses on developing power, speed, and agility and is effective in improving athletic performance. They train your muscles to generate force, improving performance for activities requiring explosive movements.
Yoga and Pilates are often associated with flexibility, but they can build core strength and stability by utilizing multiple muscle groups.
Regardless of which method of strength training you choose, it’s essential to overload your muscles to build strength. This means gradually increasing the challenge over time.
Cross-Training
You may love running, cycling, strength training, or practicing yoga, and do them for all your workouts. While enjoying your workouts is critical for consistency, mixing them up is also important. That’s why you should try new activities and find several that you enjoy.
Cross-training helps prevent overuse injuries by reducing strain on specific muscles. So, if you run every time you work out, you use the same muscles every time. Over time, this causes muscle imbalances, making it easier for you to develop an injury. Even if you don’t develop an injury, doing the same exercise every time, even though you like it, may cause boredom and burnout.
Exposing your body to different activities enhances your overall fitness and builds endurance by exposing it to new movements and challenging different muscle groups. It doesn’t take much. Incorporating at least one cross-training session per week is enough to give your body variety and recovery from your favorite activity.
Prioritize Recovery
Moderate to high-intensity exercise taxes the body by damaging tissues. Recovery is essential for your body to heal and repair itself. Prioritizing sleep, staying hydrated, and eating a balanced diet helps your body recover and repair itself.
Sleep helps repair and maintain your organs, immunity, mood, and metabolism. Unfortunately, poor or lack of sleep over time can increase the risk of developing some health conditions, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, depression, high blood pressure, and obesity. Therefore, getting enough sleep is essential for recovery and building endurance.
Staying hydrated can reduce your risk of muscle cramps and fatigue. The amount of water you need depends on a variety of factors, but it’s important to drink fluids throughout the day.
Prioritize eating a healthy, balanced diet that includes fruits, vegetables, and protein-rich foods. These foods provide the essential nutrients to refuel, repair, and rebuild muscles stronger. Don’t worry. You can eat your favorite treats in moderation, too.
On days you rest, if you’re up for some light exercise, you could do some active recovery, such as yoga and stretching. Active recovery helps maintain flexibility and reduce soreness and stiffness.
Listen To Your Body
Your body is the best indicator of whether you’re overdoing it. No fitness app, fitness tracker, or training plan should take priority over how you feel. While some soreness is expected, soreness that doesn’t go away, feeling rundown after a night of sleep, or pain are signs you need a break.
Taking a day or two off to recover will not erase all your hard work, but having to stop exercising due to an injury might. Recovery could be complete rest or a rest day workout. A good workout routine includes a rest day or a day of low-intensity workout. It’s harder to build endurance when you’ve been overdoing it.
Tracking your progress can help. It gives you a bird’s-eye view of all your efforts. Not only will you see your progress, but you may also see early indicators of trouble, which allow you to adjust your behavior and workouts before they become a problem. As a result, you keep moving in the right direction. You may even reach your goals faster and learn what works and doesn’t work for you. It may seem like an additional step, but it’s worth it. In fact, using a fitness app, fitness tracker, or both can make tracking yourself easy and automatic.
Conclusion
Building endurance isn’t about pushing yourself to the limit every day. Start small and stay consistent. There is no shortcut to increasing your stamina. It takes time and patience. You’ll build endurance while reducing your risk of injury by progressively increasing your workload, incorporating strength and cross-training, and prioritizing recovery. Tracking your progress can help you spot overtraining and persistent fatigue, allowing you to adjust your schedule to prioritize rest. With consistency and patience, you’ll exercise longer and harder and have a blast doing it.
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