If you have the goal to increase your endurance, it’s going to be important that you are paying attention to a few of the factors that will be very important for accomplishing this goal.

Endurance is something that you can definitely work on improving and with time, see great gains. You will have to be patient though as it’s not something that will develop overnight.

If you aren’t willing to put in the time to developing your endurance, you won’t realize your goals. Since endurance is all about going longer, that time factor will be essential.

Let’s look at a few of the important things to think about when considering endurance training:

Be sure to fuel properly

Right off the start, if you want to see improvements in your endurance ability it’s going to be essential that you’re fueling your body properly. It cannot be stressed enough the importance of getting in a regular carbohydrate intake to keep those muscle glycogen levels full.

If you go out to try and perform an endurance workout on an empty tank, you’re going to sputter out very quickly. This is also why keeping some helpful supplements such as energy bars or gels on hand can be very beneficial. By using these in your endurance sessions you’re going to go harder for longer – without question.

Get enough rest

Secondly, some people will always have the tendency to think that ‘more is better’, especially when it comes to endurance training.

While you do definitely want to be working on going longer and longer, this doesn’t mean you should ever discount rest. The fact of the matter is that if you’re not leaving enough time for the body to recover between your sessions, you’re just going to find that fatigue develops much faster on you.

Be sure that you’re taking at least one full day of rest a week if not two.

Use tempo sessions as well

Finally, the last thing you should do with your endurance training is make sure to include enough tempo work in the program. Tempo workouts are where you’ll go at a pace that’s slightly harder than your normal endurance pace that will help push the barrier on your training.

What you’ll do in tempo workouts is aim to perform these for a slightly extended period of time – say 20-30 minutes at this higher intensity. It’s not going to be a full out sprint as you’d never sustain that long enough, but still, it will have you working harder than your typical long cardio session.

What this is going to do is teach your body how to handle longer durations at the higher intensity. Then when you go back down to the lower intensity workouts again and perform the endurance training, it will feel that much easier thus you’ll see that much better progress.

If you can include one of these tempo workouts per week with your training, you’ll really notice a good improvement in your endurance ability.

So keep these points in mind. Endurance training is something that you can definitely improve if you put in enough time and effort.

Cabel McElderry is the director of One-to-1 Fitness in Red Deer. He can be reached at 403-341-4041. Also check out www.personaltrainingreddeer.com for more information.