When we go for a long run, run a marathon, or go on a strenuous hike our ability to reach the destination is highly influenced by our endurance. The more endurance we have, the longer we can be physically active. We can build our endurance by doing endurance training.
In this blogpost I will share what endurance training is, what it does to our body, and why it might be useful to train our endurance.
What is endurance training?
Endurance training is a type of exercise, that:
- exercises our bodies over a longer period of time,
- exercises our aerobic system (lungs, heart, circulatory system),
- increases our ability to tolerate fatigue (physical and psychological),
- increases our ability to recover our muscles faster.
How to increase endurance?
Depending on the type of endurance we want to build, we can adopt different types of training.
If we want to build endurance for general exercises/activities like walking, jogging/running, swimming, cycling, or dancing we need to introduce changes to our activity that increase our endurance. For example if we want to increase our cycling endurance, we need to gradually increase the duration and/or intensity of cycling exercise. By doing that we develop an increased capacity (endurance) to cycle longer, faster or more efficiently.
There are different ways endurance can be measured. The most common way is by monitoring our heart rate. As our endurance increases our heart rate stays low, even with increased activity. This reduces stress on the body and it can endure more intense activity.
Depending on our current level of endurance we need to do different amount and intensity of training to increase our endurance. First we need to assess our current endurance by monitoring our heart rate and breathing pattern while doing an exercise within our capacity. When we cross our capacity we might start catching our breath (we enter anaerobic breathing). The goal of endurance training is to increase our aerobic capacity.
To train our endurance we need to increase our activity just a little bit beyond our current capacity at regular intervals. With appropriate planning and adequate resting our endurance will increase over time.
Effects of endurance training on the body
In addition to increasing our endurance, endurance training has many positive health effects on our bodies. Some of them are listed here:
Heart
- Reduces our pulse at rest and pulse at exercise, which means our heart gets more efficient.
- The heart is able to pump stronger and pump more volume of blood each time it pumps.
- The recovery time of our heart muscle after exercise shortens.
- Our risk of coronary heart disease reduces.
- Reduces blood pressure at rest.
- Lowers risk of Arteriosklerosis (thickening and hardening of the walls of the arteries).
- Lowers risk of thromboses (blockages in veins and arteries).
- Reduces fat levels in the blood.
- Improves fat metabolism.
- Improves blood supply to organs and muscles.
- Increases breathing capacity.
- Increases breathing efficiency (more oxygen is absorbed with each breath).
- Increases Glykogen storages (fast energy) in the muscles.
- Increases the number of mitochondria (working units that produce power) in the muscle cells.
- More stimulants (enzymes) for aerobic ATP production.
- Contributes to weight loss (along with monitored food intake).
- Reduces fat content in the body.
- Increases glycogen storage in the muscles and liver.
- Reduces risk of type 2 diabetes.
- Reduces stress and anxiety.
- Increases self-confidence.
- Increases the feeling of well-being.
- Reduces inflammation in the body.
- Increases innate immunosurveillance (the ability of immunity cells to find foreign bacteria, viruses or cancerous cells).
- Slows down effect of ageing of the immune system.