Why should you focus on your muscular strength and endurance?
Muscular strength and endurance provide a specific amount of daily function that your body must be able to perform in order to finish specific tasks.
Let’s use a brick mason moving a pile of bricks as an example. A brick layer has two choices to move a pile of bricks: He can either carry a few bricks at the time or carry the whole load.
Question #1: Which would require less work?
Carrying the whole load at one time.
OR
Carrying a few bricks at a time.
Answer to #1: The amount of work is the exact same. They both are valid ways of moving bricks to build a chimney except you need more muscular strength for the first option and more muscular endurance for the second option.
Question #2: If you were to move the pile of bricks, how would you do it?
Carrying the whole load at one time
OR
Carrying a few bricks at a time
Your answer to question #2 explains which option you perceive is the easiest way to move a pile of bricks. Just remember no matter how
you complete the task, it requires the same amount of work.
Both are equally important. You should aim to balance your strength and endurance because you will need both for different situations and circumstances.
How do you choose what to focus on?
A screening process.
The screening process can have as many variables as you need but for the purpose of this example I am going to make a three step process with one variable.
Step 1: Choose 3-4 exercises to test.
My favorites are squats with a kettlebell, barbell bench press or dumbbell bench press, lat pull downs with a cable machine, and dumbbell overhead press. You can use this same process for any exercise you want to test.
Step 2: Then choose a weight, for each exercise, that you believe you can complete 8 to 15 reps of the movement.
Step 3: Perform the movement and measure how many reps you were able to perform before reaching complete muscular fatigue or 15 reps, whichever comes first.
Keep in mind when you boil down everything to a science it can seem more complicated than it really is. If you are still with me then what the screening process has done is uncovered your muscular strength or your muscular endurance with three simple takeaways.
#1 If you reach complete muscular fatigue before 15 reps then you have reached, what I consider, your peak muscular endurance.
#2 It is possible that if you were only able to finish 1 to 3 reps that the weight you used is closer to your peak muscular strength.
#3 Lastly, if you reach 15 reps with relative ease then it may be time to consider increasing the weight to give you more of a challenge.
For those of you who inquire about why you should raise the weight during your training sessions, ask yourself one question:
Why not make progress towards being able to complete a task that you have the capability to perform?
At the end of the day you should be able to complete any task that requires a lot of muscular strength and endurance without failing or the fear of injury.
