Sports and physical activities require you to use your muscles continuously over a prolonged period of time. Many competitive sports also demand a high level of muscular endurance, such as running, swimming, cycling, and rowing.
It’s important to understand what muscular endurance actually is, why it’s important, and how to improve it.
What is muscular endurance?
Muscular strength is your ability to move and lift objects. It’s measured by how much force you can exert and how much weight you can lift for a short period of time.
Muscular endurance is a measure of how long your muscles can keep putting out force before they get fatigued.
In short, muscular strength is how much force you can generate. But muscular endurance is how long you can generate force for.
What is the Importance of Muscular Endurance?
Muscular endurance is important for many reasons:
- Muscular endurance increases your ability to do activities that require prolonged use of muscle strength.
- Lower the risk of injury during sports or other physical activities.
- You will get a healthy body weight, healthier & stronger muscles and bones.
- Perform better for longer duration in sports competitions.
- Improve your confidence and mental wellbeing.
- Muscular endurance leads to a decreased risk of cardiovascular diseases.
- Good posture
How to Improve Muscular Endurance?
Improving muscular endurance involves increasing the total time a muscle is contracted during an exercise.
To improve muscular endurance, you need to do more reps and increase the time your muscles are under stress.
You have to focus on high-rep sets, decreasing the amount of weight in order to get more sets and reps.
Below are some exercises that can help you improve your muscular endurance.
1. Pushups
Bodyweight Push-ups can be an effective exercise to build endurance even without the gym or with hardly any equipment. Ten’s of pushups reps in sets can build your muscular endurance to a great extent.
To achieve muscular endurance, most people go for a number of repetitions in the 10-20 range. You can take smaller rest periods between sets. Some athletes even aim for failure with each set.
2. Crunches
Crunches and situps are very helpful in building muscular endurance. Keep pushing the rep range higher to achieve progressive overload and improve endurance.
3. Walking Lunges
Lunges are great for building lower body endurance. At the same time, they help improve balance and mobility, and the small stabilizing muscles around the knees, ankles, and hips.
4. Squats
Squats improve your muscle flexibility. Regularly doing squats helps you increase your endurance & strength. You can increase reps or can hold some weight in your hands to put your muscles to more strength and endurance.
5. Plank
Planks are very helpful for muscular endurance exercises. By increasing the time you remain in plank position or doing more reps you can take your muscular endurance to next levels.
6. Pull Ups
Pull-ups can be amazing to build upper-body endurance. If you find bodyweight pull-up difficult, you can go for pull-up assisting gym equipments. Once you get to the point where you can do bodyweight pull-ups fairly comfortably, you can either add weight, or steadily increase your reps in order to enhance muscular endurance.
7. Rucking
Rucking involves walking or hiking with some extra weight. The extra weight adds the intensity to your normal walk and gets your muscles to the point of additional endurance & strength. Along with endurance, it’s great at building body strength, cardio, and for weight loss.
8. Swimming
Swimming being a resistance exercise helps you build muscle strength & endurance to a great extent. Constant repetition of strokes improves muscle endurance and because water is much denser than air, the higher resistance against the body’s movements causes the muscles to be strengthened and toned. It is much more difficult to swim for a mile than to jog for a mile.
9. Running
Running is a form of cardio sport that requires muscular endurance. During running, your body performs the same movement and stride, over and over again for a longer duration. Running requires muscles to have an advanced level of endurance to perform for longer duration.
10. Deadlifts
Deadlift is ver good exercise for building muscular endurance. It works nearly every muscle, so it’s a great exercise to include in your workouts if you want to get more endurance & strength. The deadlift is also a great exercise for improving muscular strength.
