If what you want is great strength and impressive musculature, you need to work out with heavy lifting. Endurance training, on the other hand, offers you the ability to answer to strenuous, low-intensity demands on your strength for extended periods of time. In truth, though, most people aren’t interested in just one kind of ability. They want to look good, possess a moderate amount of strength and be able to get into a basketball game or play with their children without appearing weak.
A few facts about what happens when you try both at the same time!
It can be difficult to train concurrently for both strength and endurance. It is well-known that a certain interference phenomenon gets in the way. If you lift weights and do endurance exercises at the same time, you don’t see much muscle gain.
Sports researchers have been studying ways to get better results doing both strength and endurance training at the same time. They’ve come up with the following findings.
• Concurrent training can actually help improve your endurance. It does tend to interfere with muscle growth, though.
• Doing high-intensity weight training together with hard aerobics can trigger the production of an enzyme that effectively burns fat.
• Endurance training with sprints and other aerobics doesn’t cause you to lose existing muscle mass.
• The more endurance training you take up, the less strength you will have, muscle mass notwithstanding.
For the average all-rounder who needs strength, muscle mass and also endurance…
You should start out with a light warm-up: Since training concurrently for endurance and strength can continuously stress your muscles by making them flex and contract, it’s important to warm them up ahead of a workout. Light stretches and flexes are the ideal way to warm up. You should be sure to target every muscle group with lunges, bends and toe touches.
Start your weight training with an exercise band: Exercise bands offer resistance training – the thicker the band, the more resistance it offers. The best way to get your body into resistance training is to start off with a thin band and to progressively raise resistance with larger bands. These help build both strength and endurance.
Bring in free weights for upper body strength: When you need your exercise routine to give you both strength and endurance, you need to be reasonable with your weight training, keeping your weights low and performing no more than 10 reps in each set.
Building strength and endurance together requires that you train your heart and circulatory system for stamina. You need to make sure that you don’t rest more than a minute between sets. This should ensure that your heart rate is kept elevated. Exercises with free weights include squats, bench presses and curls.
Try a few bodyweight routines for both speed and strength: Learning three or four different bodyweight exercise routines can help you get a workout even when you don’t have the time to go to the gym. You can try jumps, dips and push-ups among other exercises (you can find equipment online at SportPursuit.com).
Build a few aerobic exercises into your workout: Sprints and a 3-mile run three times each week can be an excellent way to build up endurance. You can mix and match your aerobic exercises too. You should perform as many push-ups as you can, rest no more than a minute after and then set off on your 3 mile run.
Whatever you do, make sure that you constantly surprise your body!
Fitness experts recommend fitness strategies that surprise your body by constantly varying the intensity of your workout during a 7-day cycle. You need to stress your body to different levels each day. Using this strategy with the exercise routines above should get your body to respond quickly to the stresses that you place it under.
GUEST BLOGGER: Robert Vincent is a personal trainer with a knack for keeping workouts interesting and effective. When not coaching clients, he enjoys blogging about his techniques to inspire others to a healthier lifestyle.