Muscular Strength & Endurance

You know what muscular strength and endurance are, but how do you improve them?

The answer is resistance training. You must make your muscles exert relatively large amounts of force, many times, in order to increase muscular strength and endurance. How much force? How many times? If you know the answers to these questions, you will be on your way towards planning an effective strength training workout.

Muscular Failure

Muscular failure is the point when your muscles give out and you can no longer continue to perform an exercise. In order to plan an effective resistance workout, you need to know how many reps of each exercise you can do before you reach muscular failure.

If you want to improve muscular strength, every Work Set should bring you to muscular failure, or close (1-3 reps away). If you want to improve muscular endurance, your final Work Set of each exercise should bring you to muscular failure, or very close.
(Click here to read about the Principle of Progressive Overload.)

Rep Ranges for Strength & Endurance

In general, you will improve both muscular strength and muscular endurance whenever you do resistance training. However, you can choose to focus on one more than the other by:
   - doing an easier exercise for more reps (endurance)
   - doing a harder exercise for fewer reps (strength)
   - controlling the amount of rest you take between sets
(Click here to learn about reps, sets, and rest intervals.)

Here are some guidelines:

Above 20 reps, you are working muscular endurance PLUS cardiovascular endurance or anaerobic capacity, depending on the intensity of the work. (Read more about Cardiovascular Endurance and Anaerobic Capacity here.)

Remember, in order for your Work Sets to be effective, they must bring you to the point of muscular failure, or close to it. If you want to do low reps, you must do a difficult exercise.

How Many Sets?

This is a good question. Athletes typically do 2 - 6 Work Sets per exercise. The most common number of sets is 3. Increasing the number of Work Sets can be a good way to improve muscular endurance.

Recommendations

REST DAYS ARE IMPORTANT! You should do resistance training every other day, at most. Do not work out the same muscle group 2 days in a row. Muscles need at least 48 hours to recover from a resistance workout. If you work out a muscle group more often than that, you could very easily get injured.

 Start slow. If you've never done resistance training before, do one Work Set of each exercise, and don't go to muscular failure. The second week, do 2 Work Sets, and maybe go to muscular failure on the second set. Give yourself a few weeks before you're doing 3 Work Sets to failure.

 It's a good idea to hold off on weight lifting, or other high-resistance exercises, until 15 or 16 years of age. Your bones are still growing, and you can stunt your growth by lifting heavy weights at a young age.

I recommend you do most of your Work Sets in the 8 - 10 rep range, for now. This offers a good balance of muscular strength and muscular endurance.