How to Pullup #24 – Example 5

When most people say the word endurance they're usually referring to 'cardiovascular endurance', which works the stamina of your heart and lungs.

Rather than waiting for your muscles to fatigue, we're looking at your overall body performance by seeing how long you can go and how much you can do.

Aerobic over Anaerobic

With endurance training we want to use roughly around 40% of our maximum strength but with many, many, many reps...

It all comes down to the type of energy in your body we want to try to use to keep you going. Essentially, we want oxygen to be your source of fuel.

To get to this stage, we need to use less hard intensity and heavy weights (anaerobic) and switch to light/medium intensity with lighter weight/stress.

Warmup

Nothing crazy here. You just want to do something lighter that will warm you up but not fatigue you.

Some simple movement work, balancing or light rowing on the row machine will work well.

AMRAP

As Many Repetitions As Possible. Is a tool for focusing on endurance or muscular endurance.

Heavily used within Crossfit, the AMRAP can take many forms. You can change the length of times used (both for each set and total amount of time for the training) to make it very versatile. You can combine it with multiple exercises to mix different muscle groups or movements too.

This is also a good way to finish your other types of training too as a 'finisher' exercise.

Assistance work

Finished? Not quite... Once you've done the endurance portion of the training this is a good time to do a little strength training on other parts of your body.

You abs, obliques, lower back and 'core' should always get a bit of attention. So focus a little time on those muscle groups.

Why do endurance

So why do endurance? Well, simply, it means you'll be able to have more stamina with the other training you do. You'll be able to go for longer and have more tolerance to any lactic acid build-up.

It's also very good more the mechanics and technical practice too. All of those reps build in the muscle-memory and gets the neuro-muscular pathways shouting loud and clear.