How Is Muscular Endurance Built Most Effectively?

Muscular endurance is defined as a muscle's capacity to exert a sub-maximal force over a specific time period. Muscular endurance is a crucial skill to develop in sports such as swimming, cycling, wrestling and boxing. Developing a strength training program for muscular endurance is very different from a maximal strength program where the goal is to perform a single movement with maximum force.

Muscle Fiber Adaptation

In order to build your muscular endurance, you must train the slow-twitch muscle fibers in your body to efficiently exert resistance without becoming fatigued. While the best way to develop your fast-twitch muscle fibers for more explosive power is to lift heavy weight for a low number of repetitions, muscular endurance is a slower process. A muscular endurance workout program must focus on many repetitions or extended period lifts at a lower resistance level.

Train Correct Endurance

Muscular endurance is broken into two categories: short-term and long-term. It is critical you train for the type of endurance you need for your specific sport or applicable use. Short-term endurance is the ability to repeat a sub-maximal force many times. Long-term endurance means you are able to contract your muscle at a sustained force over a time period.

Meet the Training Threshold

To develop your muscles, you must ensure that you are meeting the minimum threshold for endurance training. While this number may be different for every person, Dixie State College places it around one set of eight repetitions three times a week if you are training for short-term endurance and holding a weight for 10 to 50 percent of the time you need to contract the muscle if you are training for long-term endurance. As you become stronger, the number of repetitions or time you contract your muscles should increase accordingly so the exercise remains challenging and you continue to develop more endurance.

Exercises

Each workout you perform for muscular endurance should consist of four to six different exercises that are repeated in a circuit two or three times. The amount of resistance you use for each exercise should be somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of your one-repetition maximum. The amount of rest you take between each exercise should not exceed two minutes.