Improve cardiovascular and muscle endurance to become physically fit
Learn what cardiovascular and muscle endurance are and what you can do to improve them.
What is cardiovascular and muscle endurance?
Endurance covers 2 of the 5 components of physical fitness.
So it won’t surprise you to hear that to become physically fit, you need to improve your endurance.
There are two types of endurance:
- Cardiovascular endurance
- Muscle endurance
Cardiovascular endurance is a measure of how well your respiratory organs and circulatory system is functioning.
Muscle endurance is a measure of how long your muscles can endure resistance put against them before they’re totally fatigued and lactic acid starts to build up.
For complete fitness, you need to develop both cardiovascular and muscular endurance.
How to improve cardiovascular endurance
You can increase your cardiovascular endurance by performing any exercise that you can do for an extended period of time and that requires your lungs and heart to work at a fairly constant intensity level.
Examples of exercises to increase cardiovascular endurance include: Walking, running, cycling, rowing, aerobics, etc.
The key to improving cardiovascular endurance lies in exercising within a target heart rate zone of 65% – 85% of your maximum heart rate, and then getting enough rest in between workouts for your body to recover and increase performance (speed of exercise execution at the same heart rate level) the next time you exercise. This can be seen as the Progressive Overload Training principle, but then for your heart and lungs.
How to improve muscle endurance
You can increase your muscular endurance by doing resistance exercises with light enough weights for high reps. A range of 15 reps and higher is ideal to build up endurance in your muscles.
You don’t have to go to a gym to be able to do endurance training for your muscles. A good example of this is walking up stairs. If you’ve got a public high-rise building in your neighborhood, you could walk up its stairs to increase the endurance in your legs.
Likewise, if you live around hilly terrain, you could bike up the hills to increase the endurance in your legs. And if you live near a lake, you could go rowing to increase the endurance in your back, shoulders, and arms.
The message I’d like to leave you with is: You don’t need to spend a lot of money to increase your endurance and get physically fit; you can look for creative ways to do so if you don’t have access to the more common exercise facilities.
