The Different Types of Muscular Endurance
Hey Angels and Alphas,
When we talk about strength training and male fitness, one of the most commonly talked-about topics is muscular endurance. That being said, few people really know what that means and how it affects our overall regime and results. Endurance has become an umbrella term for all types of persistence through a given stressor and that’s not the way you want to look at it if you’re going to maximize your output.
Let’s take a deeper look at this topic and try to understand what type of muscular endurance we should really seek to develop.
What is muscular endurance, exactly?
Muscular endurance, in the colloquial sense, refers to the amount of reps you can do on one specific exercise. This could be a pullup, a pushup, a lunge, a squat, etc.
Because these exercises involve prolonged durations of movement, endurance-focused activities are usually performed at a lower intensity.
In resistance training, this means less weight and more repetitions (or holding an isometric exercise like the plank for a prolonged period of time.)
If you want to accurately measure your muscular endurance, you can do this in a couple of ways depending on the muscle group and activity. For example, the push-up test is a common assessment of upper body muscular endurance, where you’ll be asked to do as many push-ups as possible in one minute. This can also include time-based tests such as the timed wall squat for your lower body.
But sometimes, people also refer to muscular endurance from the aspect of cardio, but that’s a completely different type of endurance.
Cardiovascular endurance refers to the length of time you can perform a steady cardio activity for. It has nothing to do with the ability of your muscles to persist through a given stressor.
Then, there’s an entirely different type of endurance called strength endurance – this refers to your ability to produce moderate to high amounts of muscular tension of force repeatedly with minimal recovery.
And finally, you have power endurance, which refers to your ability to produce explosive force through a period with minimal recovery.
If you want to accurately measure your muscular endurance, you can do this in a couple of ways depending on the muscle group and activity. For example, the push-up test is a common assessment of upper body muscular endurance, where you’ll be asked to do as many push-ups as possible in one minute. This can also include time-based tests such as the timed wall squat for your lower body.
If you want to measure your cardiovascular endurance, this is best done through a VO2 max test. Not only that, but some smartphones now actually gauge your VO2 max if you want a ballpark figure – since the actual test requires a visit to a training lab.
If you want to measure and test out your strength endurance and power endurance, you will have to include (1) a resistance which you can use that presents the level of challenge you want to test for and (2) how many repetitions you can do in a given period of time. This will give you an accurate representation of your ability to recover strength and power through a period where recovery is limited and you’re forcing yourself to exert a high output of energy.
All these four types of endurance are different and unique within themselves, and whether you’re an athlete training for a specific sport or a regular gym-goer who wants to improve their physical abilities, knowing how to measure each type will help you determine the right course of action for your training.
We can say that there’s no one measurement that’s deemed the most optimal when it comes to testing the different types of endurance. However, as a rule of thumb, remember that optimal levels of endurance would be those that are necessary to accomplish your desired activity. It’s all relative to you, the activity, the exercise, and your current fitness level.
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