Maintaining a good level of aerobic endurance is important for everyone - not just athletes - as it generally comes with a range of other health benefits. It’s typically at its highest from late teen years to 30s and gradually declines with age. Your cardiovascular fitness depends on factors such as age, lifestyle, genes and activity levels. Why is Aerobic Endurance Important?Īerobic endurance is incredibly important as it affects how efficiently the body can transport oxygen to where it’s needed. Training to improve your aerobic endurance increases your VO2 max as your body uses oxygen more efficiently. The test measures the maximum amount (volume) of oxygen (O2) you can use during intense or maximal exercise. The best way of measuring aerobic endurance is through a physiological performance test known as a VO2 max test. How Can I Find Out What My Aerobic Endurance is Like?

Improving your aerobic endurance will improve your body’s capability of meeting higher demands for oxygen during intense exercise.

How often should you perform aerobic exerciseĪerobic endurance refers to cardiovascular fitness Many believe that it is one of the most vital fitness-related attributes because of its link to cardiovascular health.

Read on to find out what aerobic endurance is, how you can improve it, and how training for aerobic endurance can improve your overall fitness and general cardiovascular health. It impacts your capabilities in the gym, at work, and even around the house, and a higher capacity for aerobic endurance means you can exercise at a greater intensity for longer. However, if you're doing this often, your decreased muscle mass puts you at risk of conditions such as osteoporosis (loss of bone mass, with the associated weakness).Aerobic endurance is important for many daily tasks. Of course this is only a short term term risk assuming you're not exercising to exhaustion all the time. Put another slightly more alarming way, in order to satisfy your desire to finish your workout or race, your body will eat itself in order to let you keep going. Because of most people’s fuelling strategies and reliance on the dodgy science pushed by sports nutrition companies, a significant amount of that precious muscle gets broken down in order to fuel your brain during extended exercise, especially once the glycogen stores of a sugar-dependent athlete get low - and no matter how many gels you eat, they will. However it’s not that positive for the average person who wants to live a healthy life into old age. How would Chris Froome get on the French mountains if he was carrying another stone or two? Can you imagine a 200 pound Kenenisa Bekele trying to run a 2:05 marathon? This could be viewed as positive if you’re simply looking at performance. There’s no getting away from it, it does. The bodybuilders aren’t completely wrong when they say that cardio causes muscle loss. So what are the negative effects? Here are some of them: Bad news though, lots of long distance training isn’t really that good for you. Most people reading this probably love doing endurance sport, have reaped enormous physical, social and emotional benefits from their efforts and can’t imagine that there could be much negative about their pursuit. It does nothing to enhance your physique, causes muscle breakdown etc.Īs a coach who is always looking for ways to improve the performance of my athletes, I’ve long looked for both the negative effects of long distance endurance exercise, especially for performance, and ways to counteract these negative effects. In the strength community it’s not uncommon to hear that cardio or long endurance exercise is bad for you. I follow the ideas of coaches in these and many other sports, some through their writings and some I know personally.

It’s not uncommon for me to converse with strength athletes, powerlifters, rugby players and bodybuilders to name but a few. It’s one of things that I believe makes me a better endurance coach. I don’t spend all my time in the endurance community.

Endurance fitness