How To Build Endurance?

[seiyafan]

After more than a year of training following coach's book, I can tell that my maximum strength has increase significantly, that's for sure. However my endurance did not improve much. For example, when doing push-ups, the first dozen usually feel like a walk in a park, but when it gets to 30 or so both of my arms start to become sore, it feels like all the muscle cells start to leave the house. So in science they call it the build up of lactic acid? Anyway, I am pretty sure this is something one's can improve by just keep practicing more and more, but can this be improved significantly? Will one simply build more endurance by increasing his/her maximum strength? Or do you have to train it in a different way?

[Stefan Hinote]

Have you tried training with lower intensity, and more volume?

 

Also it's not the lactic acid that causes the soreness/feeling of weakness, but the accompanying hydrogen. Lactic acid gets dumped back into the kreb's cycle for more energy production. The hydrogen ions build up, and lower pH levels.

[seiyafan]

Besides the static hold, I've been working out mostly with 5-6 reps, sometimes more but rarely more than 10 reps. Maybe I should add some of the lower intensity more volume into the training. 

 

It all started when I was helping someone move several pieces of furniture and while I did notice I could move the heavier ones which I wasn't able to before, I still got tired pretty quickly after a couple of runs. So that's why I brought it up. 

[Joshua Slocum]

The routines outlined in BTGB are focused primarily on building maximal strength. 

 

If you want to do some routines to build endurance, you should design them around a few key factors:

- start with medium intensity exercises: choose something you easily perform 5-10 of.

- as you become fatigued, you will start to lower the intensity

- very short rest between sets: no more than 30s. Ideally your rest time should be only the time it takes to move between peices of equipment.

- a reasonable mix of exercise types: you want to cycle between different movements.

 

 

Here's a sample routine. I don't know where you are, physically. This may be far too easy or far too hard for you; scale the exercises as you need to. 

- 10 russian dips (switch to regular dips when you get too tired)

- 10 leg lifts (switch to v-ups when you get too tired)

- 20s handstand (use a wall if you're too tired to balance)

- 10 squat jumps

- 2 rope-climbs (switch to pull-ups if you get tired)

- 5 press-handstands*

- 10 FL pulls*

- 10 ring support swings

 

* do the hardest variety you can manage, decreasing as necessary. 

 

At first, you will probably barely be able to manage 2 sets. Ultimately you should be able to get up to 3-4 sets but that will take some time. Also take note that this *will* interfere with your other training. You'll be so fatigued afterwards that it will probably take two days to fully recover. So you can't simply tack this on to your current Training. One thing you might consider is doing this endurance work on deload weeks: every few weeks when you need to give your body a rest from high-intensity training, switch to a week of low intensity, high volume. One other benefit of this sort of training is that the higher repetitions will also encourage more hypertrophy. 

 

This is the sort of training I would do when I first started gymnastics. It was useful for getting in good enough shape to do 1-2 hours of hard event work in a training session, and also helped develop my physique quite a bit. Not however that this recommendation is merely coming from my personal experience. I picked it up from other people in my gym, and it worked for me.

[FREDERIC DUPONT]

(...) Will one simply build more endurance by increasing his/her maximum strength? Or do you have to train it in a different way?

 

Yes to both questions.

(1) increases on max strength will carryover with better endurance for easier exercises. This will be a rather slow, but steady increase.

(2) Yet, if for instance you wanted 100 push ups faster, you may need to specifically train for it.

 

I think that If you do not want to compromise your max strength training too much, you could one of the following:

- add one set to failure once a week (on Friday if you are training MTTF, so you have 2 days for recovery)

- do your last set to failure each time you do push ups

 

If you wanted that 100 push ups and did not mind it interfered with your max strength gains, you could follow one of the many programs you can find on internet.

 

There may be better protocols to achieve that goal, but I don't know them.

[seiyafan]

In my current training whenever I do static hold such as L-sit, handstand against wall, planche lean, tucked BL, I always do every set until I can't reasonably hold it anymore (it's not like I would go crushing down that type of failure), about 4-6 sets, 2 times each week. So I pretty much pushed myself in every set every rep. Do you think there is likelihood I overtrained?