Endurance

How long can you do an activity and still maintain quality? The better endurance you have, the less quickly you become fatigued. When you are fatigued, your performance either falters or just stops. Fatigue is a complex issue with both mental and physical aspects. You can become mentally fatigued from boredom, from having an intense emotional experience, or from having a low pain tolerance or motivation for a particular activity. Physically, your body can become fatigued from weak muscles, low muscular energy stores, and low muscular oxygen capacity.

The two types of endurance are muscular endurance and cardiovascular endurance. You use muscular endurance in activities that require a muscle or group of muscles to work at a high intensity for many repetitions or for a prolonged period. Think of performing 15 or more repetitions of an exercise as using muscular endurance. Likewise, holding on to a very heavy object for a long period of time shows muscular endurance. Muscular endurance activities typically cannot last longer than two minutes, because the muscles cannot generate or store that much energy. You'll find more details about muscular endurance in chapter 5.

Cardiovascular endurance is the type of endurance that marathon runners have. You can think of it as whole-body endurance, as opposed to stamina in only one muscle or muscle group. In order to sustain the entire body for a prolonged bout of exercise, muscles need the oxygen that is delivered to them by the cardiovascular and respiratory systems.