Tips for Building Stamina

Improve your health and sports performance by improving your stamina. In addition to building muscle strength generally, you'll want to improve your ability to use your muscles during an entire match, game or meet. You do this by building muscular endurance, or stamina. You can also improve your cardiovascular stamina using aerobic exercise, which is activity that keeps your heart beats per minute at a consistently high rate for 15 minutes or more.

Use Lighter Weights

If you want to improve muscular endurance, you need to work your muscles for longer periods of time. Using your maximum weight will fatigue you in as little as three to five repetitions of an exercise. Work on muscle stamina using 50 percent of your maximum weight or less, performing 8 to 12 reps per set.

Use Circuit Training

You can improve muscular endurance and cardiovascular stamina at the same time with circuit training. A circuit training routine has you moving from exercise to exercise with only a short break between sets to keep your intensity high. To get your heart rate up and create even more aerobic conditioning, decrease your weight to a point that you can perform 10 to 15 repetitions of an exercise, moving from set to set during a 30-minute workout. Rest no more than 60 seconds between sets.

Learn Your Aerobic Target Heart Rate

Do aerobic exercise to improve and maintain cardiovascular stamina. Aerobic exercise occurs when your heart rate is 70 to 80 percent of your maximum heart rate for a sustained period of time. You can use a variety of formulas and online calculators to determine your maximum heart rate. One of the simplest is to subtract your age from 220. If you are 40 years old, your maximum heart rate is 180. Multiply that number by .70 and .80 to determine what 70 to 80 percent of your maximum heart rate is. In this case, that would be 126 to 144, which is the range in which you should exercise for stamina building.

Start Slow

If you are new to exercise, don't work at a heart rate that causes you to fatigue quickly and need to stop for long periods of recovery time. Instead, increase stamina by starting slower and going longer, taking short rest periods before starting again. As you increase your stamina, you can raise your heart rate and work for longer periods of time. Ultimately, you want to create aerobic workouts that last for 30 minutes or longer.

Pick the Right Exercise

You don't need to focus on muscle building if your goal is improving stamina, so choose activities you can do that aren't too stressful or that require you to learn new movements. Do circuit training with simple exercises such as push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, chin-ups, squats, lunges and dips. You can also do exercises with dumbbells or resistance bands.
For aerobic workouts, you can use activities with which you are already familiar, such as biking, swimming, skating, jogging or dancing. If you are starting slow, try brisk walking or an exercise machine, such as a treadmill or elliptical with less resistance, at a slower pace until you build your stamina for aerobic exercise.