Muscular Endurance

What is Muscular Endurance?

It is your muscles ability to sustain an activity over a period time against a particular resistance level with little fatigue. It’s a balance between muscular strength and stamina.

Many people, who weight train with a goal of increasing their strength, strictly train by doing low reps with heavyweights. What's important to understand is that training your muscles for endurance will help you make faster gains for your overall strength.

Why it's Important?

A minimum level of endurance for the body’s muscles is needed for daily life. Many activities we perform at work or at home call for sustained movement of our muscles. If our endurance is below a minimum level, our muscles will tire quickly. This forces other muscles to pick up the slack. When this occurs, it can put our body at greater risk of injury, because now the activity is being performed in an awkward manner.

Increasing your Endurance

Generally speaking, for non-athletes, when performing resistance exercises do at least 3 sets of 10-15 repetitions. This should be sufficient in building your muscular endurance.

If you play sports for competition or leisure and are looking for improved athletic performance consider repetitions of 12-25.

For those that are new exercising if you have difficulty with these numbers either lower your resistance level or do fewer repetitions and work your way up. Some great ways to train for increasing the endurance in your muscles are:

Remember, if you are a beginner, do not get discourage if you have difficulty at first performing these exercises. You are no different than anyone else who first started. Stay focused and practice and you will get better. I promise!