How to Build Endurance for a Stronger Heart and Muscles
When faced with low energy levels hindering daily activities or even a new hour-long fitness class, it's easy to attribute it to a poor night's sleep or common stressors. However, amidst these factors, it's important to recognize the impact of your physical endurance.
What Is Endurance?
Physical endurance refers most
simply to one’s ability to maintain a certain level of activity for a prolonged
amount of time. Endurance is a term we often hear associated with athletes,
especially those who compete in a sport that requires them to go the distance
and withstand tiring feats of muscular and cardiovascular over extended
stretches of time (think: marathon runners, professional soccer players,
cross-country skiers). But elite athletes aren’t the only ones who benefit
from—or need—physical endurance. Whether you want to enjoy a long walk with
your dog or spend the day at an amusement park with your kids, every single
body requires some level of endurance to power through life. And it’s something
you can improve and build upon anytime.
There are two types of physical
endurance, cardiovascular endurance and muscular endurance.
Cardiovascular Endurance
“Cardiovascular endurance is your
body’s capacity to exercise for an extended period, such as running a 5K or
taking a spin class,” says Jen Rulon, fitness coach and 15-time Ironman
triathlete. This type of endurance is what you need to sustain activity any
time you get your heart pumping, when your heart and lungs are working together
to help fuel your body with oxygen.
“Cardiovascular endurance is
critical for your daily life and performance in sports and physical activity,”
says Alex Rothstein, MS, CSCS, coordinator and instructor for the exercise
science program at New York Institute of Technology in Long Island.
So how do you build endurance? As
you might guess, movement—aerobic activity—is key for several reasons. The more
endurance you have, the more “[y]ou’ll be able to perform an activity at
greater intensities and for longer durations,” Rothstein says. If you’ve ever
gotten fatigued during an activity, or even stopped an activity because you
feel a burning sensation, those two incidents will be reduced if you improve
your cardiovascular endurance.
Increasing your cardiovascular
endurance can lead to significant improvements in your overall health. Better
endurance can help lower your cholesterol and blood pressure, Rulon says,
as well as boost your respiratory and circulatory systems.
Endurance vs. Stamina
Note, though, that endurance is
often confused with stamina. While the two are similar and related,
cardiovascular endurance focuses on just the physiological components of
maintaining physical effort, whereas stamina includes the psychological as well
as the physiological components. “Stamina is a combination of cardiovascular
endurance and the perception of fatigue,” Rothstein says, adding that it also
includes the ability to push past the feeling of fatigue.
Muscular Endurance
Cardiovascular endurance
primarily involves your heart, but muscular endurance is related to the
strength and ability of your muscles. “It’s how often you can move a weight
without getting tired, something you need to improve your cardiovascular
system,” Rulon says.
You can’t talk about muscular
endurance without mentioning muscular strength, or the maximum amount of force
that can be produced one single time. With better muscular strength and
endurance, “you’ll become better at handling stress or cardiovascular
training,” Rothstein says.
How to Build Endurance
If you want to build these two
types of physical endurance, it’s time to get moving. Building
cardiovascular endurance requires doing cardiovascular or aerobic activity
(like walking, jogging, swimming, or cycling), but how you do that
activity matters, which is where a principle called “specific adaptation to
imposed demands'' (SAID) comes into play. The SAID principle states that the
body will adapt to the specific demands imposed upon it. “To become better at
cardiovascular endurance, your cardiovascular system needs to be challenged
with enough stress to signal a need to adapt,” Rothstein says.
To do this, there are three main variables
you can play with:
·
Frequency (how often you exercise)
·
Intensity (how hard you exercise)
·
Duration (for how long you exercise)
“Increasing and/or decreasing any
one or combination of these variables will challenge your cardiovascular system
differently and cause different adaptations to occur,” Rothstein explains. For
instance, increasing the duration of your workouts will tell your body to
improve its ability to use fat for energy so you can exercise for longer, while
higher-intensity exercise may increase your body’s ability to supply more
oxygen and use the supplied oxygen more quickly and efficiently.
Likewise, to increase muscular
endurance, you need to do strength training, focusing on doing more
repetitions with lighter weights, Rulon says. Aim to do two to three full-body
strength workouts a week, as recommended by the American College of Sports
Medicine.
How Long Does It Take to Build
Endurance?
How long will it take for you to
improve your physical endurance? It varies from one individual to another, but
in general, Rulon says that if you’re doing three 30-minute workouts a week,
you can expect to see improvements in cardiovascular endurance in eight to 12
weeks. With muscular endurance, many studies show that there’s improvement
after six weeks, she says.
Keep Pushing Your Boundaries to
Build Endurance
Whether you’re training for
cardiovascular or muscular endurance, or both, it’s important that you’re
really challenging 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!).
And as soon as you adapt—an activity becomes easy to do or you stop noticing
progress—it’s time to change something again. Maybe you start running for 10
minutes longer, push harder with some faster sprints at the end, or go for runs
more frequently throughout the week. Otherwise, it’s easy to get stuck on a
plateau, he explains.
The Importance of Recovery and
Rest
The catch is that it’s also
extremely important to find a good balance: Don’t overdo your training,
otherwise you could risk injuring yourself, Rothstein says. Recovery begins as
soon as you’ve ended a workout, and that recovery time is crucial for
building endurance. “Exercise that stimulates the need for adaptation is going
to break your body down and weaken you temporarily,” he explains. “During the
rest and recovery phase you build back to be stronger.”
But people often get so excited
about forging forward with their fitness that they ignore cool-down practices
and necessary rest days—and that’s a mistake. Take at least one day off from
structured exercise every week, maybe more if you’re new to exercise or
doing extremely high-intensity workouts.
Recovery includes getting enough sleep, too. “Sleep allows your body to recover and restore itself,” Rulon says. In fact, sleep and exercise have an interesting relationship, as sleep quality has been shown to help with exercise, while exercise may potentially help improve your sleep quality, Rothstein adds. The general sleep recommendation for adults is to get seven to nine hours of sleep every night.