How to Build Strength & Stamina

You build strength by challenging your skeletal muscles. Strength can be deliberately developed with resistance training exercises. By regularly making your skeletal muscles perform against an opposing force when you work them, it forces your body to adapt to the demands being placed on it by growing more muscle cells and improving the strength of your muscle cell contraction. You build stamina by challenging your cardiorespiratory system. This means pushing your body to become more efficient at taking in and delivering oxygen to your muscle cells to produce energy. Stamina may be deliberately developed through aerobic endurance training exercises.

Instructions

Aerobic Endurance Training

• 1

  Select two or three endurance exercises to be a part of your training routine. This could be jogging, cycling, skating, rollerblading, jumping rope, cross-country skiing, rowing, swimming, dance, stair climbing, or using an elliptical machine. Alternate among your choice exercises every day or every other day. This is called "cross training." It works to challenge your muscles in different ways and helps to reduce your risk for exercise injury.

• 2

  Incorporate sprints (also called “interval training”) into your endurance exercises. After warming up, segue into an exercise pace that leaves you breathy when you talk but not so breathless that it is very difficult to talk. Perform at this tempo for 3 to 5 minutes, then speed up your pace to a rate that makes you winded. Hold this sprint pace for 30 to 60 seconds, then return to your previous “recovery” pace for another 3 to 5 minutes. Keep repeating this cycle. Perform as many cycles as you can with this exercise. Work yourself up to a total duration of 45 to 60 minutes with each choice exercise.

• 3

  Shorten the duration of your recovery by 30 to 60 seconds once you’ve met the final challenge in step 2 (of working out for 45 to 60 minutes). Continue to decrease your recovery duration every time you meet this final challenge under new conditions. Work yourself up to a ratio where your recovery duration is only 3 times as long as your sprint pace duration and you are able to maintain your workout for 45 to 60 minutes.

Resistance Training

• 4

  Do some form of resistance training every day.

• 5

  Concentrate on your upper body muscle groups one day, focus on your core muscles the following day, and work your lower body muscle groups the next day. Continue to repeat this cycle. Use the Calisthenics Exercises resource below to put together a resistance training routine.

• 6

  Complete as many reps of each exercise as you can perform in good form. Allow yourself 60 to 90 seconds of rest before moving on to the next exercise in your day’s routine.