Muscular endurance is your ability to use your muscles over a period of time, such as during a marathon, tennis match or football game. Unlike muscle-building exercises, muscular endurance activities are not done with maximum loads. Training your muscles for endurance will help you delay fatigue, perform longer, burn more calories and generally improve your physical fitness and sports performance.
Use Circuit Training
Circuit training has you move from one exercise to another in quick succession, using lighter weights at a higher intensity, with rest periods in between. While no component of the routine lasts for a long time, the entire circuit could take 30 minutes or more to complete.
A circuit might include a variety of dumbbell exercises, body weight exercises (sit-ups, push-ups, pull-ups, chin-ups), weighted and non-weighted squats and lunges, and the use of one or more pieces of exercise equipment (exercise bike, rowing machine). Use weights and machine resistance settings that challenge your muscles (15 to 50 percent of your maximum), but do not fatigue them to failure.
Use Anaerobic Training
Many sports, like tennis, volleyball, football and others, require you to recover quickly before you begin the next point or play. Most points or plays are done in short bouts (30 seconds or less) of high-intensity work, using no oxygen, with glycogen as the main fuel. Your muscles need adenosine tri-phosphate during these points and plays, which needs to be replenished after each one. Increase your anaerobic muscular endurance by training in short bouts of high-intensity movements with recovery periods in between.
Do rope ladder, tire, line, spider or other footwork drills at maximum or near-maximum intensity for 30 to 90 seconds, with two or more minutes of recovery before the next set. Sprint the straightaway of a track, then walk the curves. Change the resistance settings on a rowing machine or other exercise machines so that you can work at high intensity during a sprint-and-recover exercise.
Use Complementary Aerobic Exercises
Increasing your cardiovascular endurance will increase your ability to train longer, which means you can use your muscles longer. Depending on how you perform aerobic exercise (how much muscle you use), you improve muscular endurance during aerobic exercise, since you'll be using those muscles during your 30-minute (or longer) workout.
Choose aerobic workouts that most closely resemble the sport for which you want to build muscular endurance, so you use those muscles during the aerobic workout and improve muscular endurance. Using an exercise bike or treadmill, for example, will train cardiovascular endurance, but you will use few muscles. These may not be effective aerobic workouts for training muscular endurance (unless you want to train lower-body muscular endurance only).
More total-body aerobic activities to improve endurance include swimming, rowing, aerobic dancing with hand weights and using certain exercise machines.
Exercising at 70 to 80 percent of your maximum heart rate (MHR) will get you in an aerobic work zone. Subtract your age from 220 to determine your 70 to 80 percent range.
Member Comments