Stamina, also known as endurance, is your ability to perform physical activity over a period of time. You can improve both muscular and cardiovascular endurance with a variety of exercises that emphasize more repetitions or a longer duration of work done at lower intensities, rather than the short bursts of maximum intensity exercises associated with muscle building or sprint training.
Aerobic Exercises
The Mayo Clinic and other health experts recommend aerobic exercise for improving cardiovascular stamina. These exercises have you working at a high intensity for 15 minutes or longer, typically 30 minutes to an hour. While you should break a good sweat and be breathing hard during a cardio routine, if you can't talk, you are working too hard and have gone into the anaerobic zone, which does not require oxygen to perform the work. If you go anaerobic, you will likely fatigue quickly and realize you have worked too hard.
Aerobic exercises options that help build cardiovascular stamina include swimming, jogging, jumping rope, treadmills, stationary bikes or outdoor cycling, elliptical machines, aerobic dancing, rowing and skating.
When starting an aerobic stamina building program, feel free to start and stop as you increase your cardiovascular endurance. Consider working at a slower pace the lets you work longer without taking a break, rather than trying to raise your heart rate to a high intensity that has you stopping after only a few minutes. A heart rate monitor or exercise machine with a heart rate monitor is a great way to chart your progress by letting you see your heart rate during exercise and your average heart rate during your routine after you've completed your workout.
Dumbbell Exercises
Dumbbell exercises are a popular choice for those seeking to increase muscular endurance because you can choose weights that allow you to perform more repetitions, increasing the weight as you build more stamina. Use dumbbells with enough weight to perform 8 to 10 repetitions of an exercise before you fatigue or fail.
Dumbbell exercises include biceps curls, done by lifting the weights straight up or across your body; flyes, done by starting with your arms straight out, then bending your elbows in until your fists touch in front of your chest; chest presses, which have you lying on the floor, pushing the weights toward the ceiling; and triceps extensions, which have you starting with your hands behind your head, then turning your palms forward as you raise your hands above your head.
You can use dumbbells to work on cardiovascular stamina by using slightly lighter weights and performing more repetitions, working at an intensity that creates an aerobic workout.
Bodyweight Exercises
Using your body's weight as the resistance, you can build muscular endurance with push-ups, sit-ups, crunches, lunges, squats, pull-ups and chin-ups. Perform 10 to 15 repetitions before moving to the next set, and repeat each set two to five times, depending on your conditioning. You can add an aerobic stamina component to a bodyweight routine by doing these exercises faster, with shorter breaks in between sets, over a 15- 30- or 60-minute time frame.
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