You want better endurance. You want to know you can go farther and for longer, and feel good while you do it. Buuuut, you don’t want to give up all of the strength you gained in the process. Or, you want to gain some strength while improving your endurance. The problem is, you know what you want, but you’re not sure how to go about getting it.
What kind of endurance training should you do right now? When should you lift? Will doing both at the same time interfere with each other?
I have the answers to your questions. Yes, you can improve your endurance without losing strength. But you have to be smart about it.
There are three big things you need to know. I’ll lay them out for you and give you two sample training weeks that improve endurance while maintaining strength.
First, Know What Your Endurance Needs
Endurance is more than just something a person has or doesn’t have. It’s an interaction between multiple physical abilities. Included is aerobic capacity; the ability to produce energy aerobically for long periods. There’s aerobic power, or how fast your body aerobically produces energy. Anaerobic capacity and power play a role when movement gets intense. And, believe it or not, even strength contributes to endurance. So, it’s often not as easy as saying “just do this” to improve your endurance. It’s necessary to tease out what training your endurance needs.
If you have a solid base of aerobic capacity, it’s likely that aerobic power is the missing link. But if you’ve only been doing high-intensity conditioning, it’s time for lower and slower aerobic capacity training. If whatever’s challenging your endurance has a lot of hard, uphill pushes followed by the need for quick recovery, anaerobic and strength training might be what you need right now. All of these qualities and types of training must work together in the right doses and proportions if you want great endurance.
That said, aerobic capacity training volume typically moves the needle most for people wanting to improve their endurance. That means a good amount of aerobic capacity training at easy to moderate intensities. If you’re using heart rate zones, it’s training in Zones 1 and 2 for at least several hours per week. But if you’ve never worn a heart rate monitor in your life, it means moving at a pace that’s slightly challenging but you could maintain for a long time, while your breathing is slow enough that you remain conversational.
Aerobic capacity training works so well for a couple of reasons. First, it’s easy to recover from. That means you can handle a lot of it. When it comes to endurance, and most other physical abilities, training volume is king. So, any training you can do a lot of will take you the farthest. Second, it lays the foundation for working at higher intensities. Think of it like driving on a highway. Aerobic capacity training paves smooth roads so you can speed down them. Without a sufficient amount of aerobic capacity work, the roads are bumpy and covered in gravel. Fuel and oxygen don’t have an efficient path to your muscles, so you can’t go as fast. The bumpy road also beats the hell out of your car.
If you’ve been consistent with aerobic capacity training for a while, and it feels like you’ve hit a plateau, it’s time to examine whether you need some aerobic power training to improve your endurance.
If you’re just getting started, you just need a solid dose of aerobic capacity training.
With that settled, let’s look at how we keep our strength while building our endurance.
Second, Manage Your Training Schedule
A study that came out in 1980 made people believe that endurance training interfered with strength and muscle gains. So, they went looking for a molecular cause. The idea was that the pathways that signaled endurance gains inhibited the pathways that signaled muscle and strength gains. They’ve been searching for 46 years and have yet to find any conclusive evidence in humans. But there is a brand of interference between endurance and strength training that does matter—fatigue.
A mismanaged training schedule with too much training volume, or with sessions planned in the wrong places, can cause endurance fatigue that interferes with strength training. In this case, endurance training depletes your gas tank and you don’t have the energy for quality strength training sessions. We’ll start with a mismanaged schedule then move on to overall fatigue.
Hold on. We need to cover something before we go further.
There is a difference between maintaining strength while you improve your endurance and trying to gain both at the same time. If you’re only training to maintain your strength while pushing your endurance, some degradation in the quality of your strength sessions isn’t a big deal. You’ll still get enough out of them to maintain your strength. You also might have to trade some training volume, giving some of your normal strength volume to endurance volume. Don’t freak out about that. You can maintain strength and muscle with about ⅓ of the volume it took to build it. Okay. Onward.
Alright, one of the big planning mistakes is doing endurance work directly before strength training, especially longer aerobic capacity sessions or intense aerobic power sessions. This causes metabolic, and some neurological, fatigue that makes it difficult to access your strength. That means you can’t generate as much force during strength training. That’s a nerdy way to say that you can’t use as much weight or handle as much volume during that session. The combination limits how much strength you can gain. Instead, put at least 3 hours between the sessions, and make sure you eat something soon after the endurance session so your body has time to use the nutrients for recovery.
Another big mistake is doing a long or intense conditioning session the day before a heavy strength session. The residual fatigue limits your access to strength. Instead, put a day of rest between the workouts or do a shorter, low-intensity conditioning session on the day between the workouts. This allows you to recover from training without building too much residual fatigue that affects the rest of your training sessions for the week. It also allows you to keep the quality of both sessions high.
The third mistake is trying to do all of this training with a significant caloric deficit. Trying to lose weight, get stronger, and improve your endurance at the same time is an express ticket to the shit can station. You have to eat. Not like you’re headed to the electric chair or anything. But you have to eat enough to support all of the work you’re doing and recover from it.
Third, You Have to do Some Heavy Lifting
I’m not talking about maxing out during each strength session. But it’s necessary to lift heavy enough to send a message to your nervous system that strength is still important. Doing a bunch of high-volume sets of 10 to 20 isn’t enough for your nervous system to think strength is still important. You have to pick up some heavy shit, preferably in the 3 to 8 rep range. Otherwise, you’ll lose strength while building your endurance. You have to lift if you want both, kids.
Now, with all that on the table, let’s look at a sample weekly training schedule based on what we do at Beyond Strength.
Sample Strength and Endurance Training Schedule
Below are two sample training weeks. The first is for a person just getting started with endurance training. The second is for a person with a decent aerobic base who needs to add in aerobic power training to get to the next level with their endurance.
Sample Week 1
| Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday |
| Heavy lift | Aerobic capacity
(60 mins) |
Rest | Moderate lift | Aerobic capacity
(60 mins) |
Aerobic capacity
(90 mins) |
Rest |
Sample Week 2
| Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday |
| Heavy lift | Aerobic capacity
(30 mins) |
Aerobic Power | Aerobic capacity
(60 mins) |
Moderate lift | Aerobic capacity
(90+ mins) |
Rest |
Improve Your Endurance, Maintain Your Strength
You can improve your endurance while maintaining your strength. Heck, in some cases you can get stronger while improving your endurance. But you have to be smart about it. Find out what you need right now from an endurance perspective. Manage your training schedule. And remember that you still have to lift heavy.
All this make sense but you’re not sure how to put it all together? We’re happy to help. Click the link below to book your free intro and we’ll sit down to figure out the best training approach for your strength and endurance goals.
Stop overthinking your fitness.
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And if you’re ready to get started, schedule a free intro below and we’ll help you build a plan that actually works for your life.
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