Just as there are exercises for strength, flexibility, balance, and cardiovascular health. Some exercises build endurance. Endurance is normally thought of as a cardiovascular trait. It’s the ability to run up and down stairs without getting winded. It builds up the ability of the lungs and heart to provide oxygen for the body. Endurance is more than that. It’s also the ability to work other muscles hard for an extended period. You need both types of endurance to be truly fit. Some exercises are better than others at meeting that goal.
Building muscle endurance requires doing one strength-building exercise to failure.
Whether you’re lifting weights or doing push-ups, you’ll build muscle. If you do them until you fail and in the case of push-ups, can’t lift your body off the floor, you’re building muscle endurance. Your arms and body should be almost quivering. Holding a plank until failure is another way to build muscle endurance. Doing five to ten sets of 30 walking lunges until your legs turn to jelly is another way to boost muscle endurance.
Increase your cardiovascular endurance with HIIT—-high intensity interval training—-workouts.
HIIT isn’t a specific exercise but a way of doing any exercise. You vary the intensity of the workout between high-intensity and recovery instead of doing steady state-workouts. You can even modify walking. Walk at a moderate pace for a few minutes, then speed things up to top speed for less time or the same amount of time. Return to the moderate recovery pace and continue alternating. HIIT boosts cardiovascular endurance faster and helps lower blood pressure.
Supersets push your endurance to the limit.
You’ll maximize your strength, boost endurance, and get more from each session when you do supersets. Supersets are two or more exercises for opposing muscle groups, the same muscle groups, and other combinations. They’re combined without much rest between them. You can combine push-ups with bench presses as a superset. You can also do pancake push-ups to failure and immediately move to dive-bomber push-ups with rest between the two that’s 30 seconds or shorter.
- Working for more endurance requires you to push your body a little more each session. You’re constantly building toward a heavier load or more repetitions.
- Building core strength is vital to endurance. You can build core strength with superman exercises, planks, bridges, and flutter kicks.
- If you’re doing resistance exercises, you can boost your cardio and build your endurance by doing them faster and cutting the rest time between sets and exercises. Interval training helps.
- Exercises that require explosive movements can increase both muscle and cardiovascular endurance. Examples are burpees, squat thrusts, frog squat jumps, and tuck jumps.
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