Muscular Endurance

Some of you may not know what muscular endurance is. You might think it's strength... but it's not exactly that.

When I think of strength, I think of heavy objects and arm wrestling. Strength doesn't mean fitness, although it sure does help. After all, muscle burns more calories at a resting state, rather than no muscle mass. To me fitness is being able to do things with your body, like run, bike, swim, pullups, pushups, free running, etc... Not lifting huge weights. It's pretty awesome to lift huge weights, don't get me wrong, but I usually prefer fitness over strength.

Anyway, the best way to get fit (not buff) is to eat healthy (extra protein can't hurt!), have good sleeping habits, and do body weight workouts. To get buff you need to eat a ton more, lift heavy weights, and do less cardio work.

I'm a tad off subject, so I'm going to get back to muscular endurance. As you might have guessed, muscular endurance is more like fitness than strength. Running, biking, swimming, pullups, pushups, and many more exercises use muscular endurance. Some of them work your cardio, but they still use endurance. At first pushups and pullups may not seem like muscular endurance (especially pullups), because you can only do a few. When you're at that stage it's more strength building. It will eventually become muscular endurance to you... but maybe not pullups. I worked really hard for a few years to get where I am now. Not many people get past 10-15 pullups, and that's where the endurance kicks in.

I highly recommend doing bodyweight workouts! Not just weight lifting, or just running. Those are the two extremes. Weight lifting doesn't get you very fit, but gets you strong, running doesn't make you very strong, but makes you fit. Mix them up and add bodyweight lifting!

Now, why am I writing about this? It's because I can feel my muscular endurance building up. Doing this pushup push, it's actually becoming easier as I go. My first day extremely challenging. I worked a little harder than yesterday, but I could barely finish Monday's. Yesterday I finished pretty easily. I think I'm going to decrease my sets and increase my reps on my rest days. I could do a set of 30 every 4 minutes pretty easily yesterday, so I think doing 45 every 30 minutes should be pretty easy on my rest days! Also it'll take less time if I do higher reps.

Oh yes, yesterday I said I would let guy know how I did on my workout because I was really busy. I finished my school a little early by cramming, then did 30 pushups every 4 minutes. During my 4 minute rest breaks I did the chores I had to do before SMASH. I completed it just in time for a small lunch and a 3 minute shower before SMASH. But only the last two sets were challenging, so I'm going to increase my reps or shorten my breaks between sets on my workdays as well. 900 done, 2100 to go!