Sunday 7.11.10

Brian MacKenzie, Anaerobic, Inc.
Stamina vs. Endurance

An article in the Summer 2010 edition of Los Angeles Sports and Fitness Magazine [http://lasandf.com/] highlighted CrossFit Endurance (CFE). CFE is a strength and conditioning program excelling at producing fitter endurance athletes with less miles and smarter training. The idea behind CFE is that stamina replaces endurance, which to many people are synonymous words. They are not however:

-Cardio Respiratory Endurance is the ability of body systems to gather, process, and deliver oxygen.

-Stamina is the ability of body systems to process, deliver, store, and utilize energy.

“Your aerobic activity changes very little after 10 kilometers, so it makes no sense to focus on this training once you’ve proven you can use oxygen effectively,” says CFE creator, Brian Mackenzie. “So why are you still getting sore? It’s a lack in strength and conditioning. Running alone won’t get you strong. You can beat yourself up with long, slow training, then follow it up with hours upon hours to recover. Or you can do real strength conditioning and be sore for a much shorter amount of time.” (to view this article follow this link).

A search of the dictionary, thesaurus, wikipedia, etc. suggests stamina is strength recovery and resistance, both physical in nature. Meanwhile, endurance seems to be an ability or toleration to continue or survive implying a more mental aspect. It’s important to train for both, but interestingly replacing stamina with endurance through short, interval-oriented high intensity workouts (anaerobic) increases both your aerobic and anaerobic abilities. While endurance training, traditionally slow and steady workouts, will only noticeably increase your aerobic abilities.

The good news for us is the more intense the workouts are, the less training we need to do to get the best results. And the less training we do means less chance of injuring ourselves while training and the more time to spend doing the things in life we are out there trying to get in shape for. cc

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