Weight Training Basics – What Is Muscular Endurance Training?
Muscular Endurance training is a type of weight training that trains the endurance pathways of the muscle. What this means in basic terms – this type of training allows you to do a lot of reps with a light/moderate weight. Think of the guy you knew in high school that could do 100 pushups in one set. That guy had a lot of muscular endurance. Similar to other specific training methods, getting great with muscular endurance takes a lot of energy and time, leading to less overall maximal strength and sometimes even hypertrophy. If you can recall, specializing in one training modality usually lessens the progress of other modalities.
A lot of people love combining calisthenics with muscular endurance training. This can be great because your body weight probably doesn’t fluctuate too much if you have your diet locked down. Knowing your bodyweight is always similar, you can improve your push ups, pull ups, and pistol squats with the proper training. You don’t only have to use your bodyweight for muscular endurance, however. You can use weights, resistance, etc. just as you would for other training types.
Who Should Be Training For Muscular Endurance?
If you want to be balanced with your fitness, you should be using some type of muscular endurance training. If you want to be able to do a lot of pushups or pull ups in one set, you need to be training for muscular endurance. A lot of athletes can utilize this type of training as well. Many sports require repeated sub-maximal effort consistently. I have found that basketball players can improve their athleticism on the court greatly with specified muscular endurance training. Think about how much you jump in a basketball game. Every jump is with a sub-maximal load and it is repeated often. Sound similar?
** Side Note – I feel as if athletes are pushed towards maximal strength training too much for little added benefit in their games. Yes, strength is very important to develop. However, how often are maximal loads actually used in athletics? Most maximal effort occasions come from maximum force production with small loads – which is why plyometrics is the perfect fit for athletes, along with a good muscular endurance training protocol. **
Basic Muscular Endurance Training
This could be the easiest type of training to program because the loads are light and the mark of progress is more reps every workout. If you want to improve your upper body muscular endurance, pushup and pull ups are great. We will use those for an example. Say your maximum set of push ups is 40 and your maximum set of pull ups is 15. To improve these, we want to push the endurance limits of your muscles. How is this done? Well, take every set to failure! Since the load is light, your CNS won’t crap out on your like maxing out on strength sets too often. With this type of training, your muscles need to efficiently remove waste products from the muscle to increase its work capacity. For that reason, rest time between sets will be kept to 30 seconds.
Lets look at a simple and quick upper body workout:
- Pushups – 3 sets x max reps, 30 seconds rest in between sets
- Pull Ups – 3 sets x max reps, 30 seconds rest in between sets
This is simple, effective, and can be added to the end of a long workout that specializes in something else, like hypertrophy or strength. With this type of muscular endurance training, you can train for multiple pathways in the same workout. If you are really serious about muscular endurance training and don’t care as much about the other modalities, check out the next section.
Advanced Muscular Endurance Training
A great tactic to build muscular endurance faster is to push out more reps once you hit failure. One way to do this is to lower your weight and continue with the set – the classic drop set. Another way is to use the rest-pause technique with the same weight. Both of these intensity tactics will have your muscles burning like no other! You don’t need to use these every set, however. Instead, using one of these is a great way to finish an exercise.Specializing in only muscular endurance training can still have quick workouts. However, you won’t be splitting up the body parts like the typical bodybuilder routine. Instead, you are going to be doing full body workouts. A great way to be able to hit every muscle in the same workout without spending hours in the gym is to superset an upper body move with a lower body move. For example, hitting machine chest press and then going straight into leg extensions won’t affect your performance on either move and will save quite a bit of time.
Bang Out Those Reps!
Lets face it, 100 pushups in one set can be pretty impressive since the majority of gym goers probably can’t do half of that. Even better, a set of 50 pull ups can be jaw dropping since a lot of people can’t even master one pull up! So, maybe it is time to put strength and hypertrophy on the back burner and focus on something a little different for once. I promise, it is a fun and rewarding way to workout – also, a great way to burn calories if you are cutting!
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