The easiest is to just take some rest days. Give specific muscle groups a day or two to recover before you push them any further.

You can also avoid intense cardio or not work out at all a few days a week. Just stagger your exercise days to give your body all the time it needs. Post-exercise stretching is another great idea. While most of us know to stretch the muscles to prevent injury before a workout, not too many people will go to that extra trouble after an intense exercise session.

Stretching allows the muscles to cool down slowly instead of abruptly. What does this do for your body? Well, it prevents that awful feeling of muscle tightness and joint stiffness. A few stretches can keep the muscles pliable. With regular practice, a good stretching regime could even improve your range of motion and give you some better performance results.

Soft tissue massages can make a huge difference in recovery time. Many athletes swear by them. Massages from a professional masseuse can help to realign muscle tissue, reduce inflammation, and get rid of tightness. Plus, it improves the circulatory system. After intense exercise, lymphatic fluid builds up in the muscles.

Massages can mobilize the lymphatic fluid, essentially flushing it from your system. At the same time, your blood will have an easier time flowing around your body. As a result, your heart can pump oxygenated blood and essential nutrients directly to your sore muscles to speed up the recovery process.

You can always use a foam roller. These inexpensive accessories are great for performing a self-massage. Most rollers are fitted with thick grooves and unique surface designs. They make it easier for you to target specific muscle groups and painful connective tissue. All you have to do is place the device on the floor and roll your body over it.

Your weight will do all of the work for you. In fact, training your brain is one of the most effective ways to improve your athletic performance and gain an advantage over the competition.

Most sports rely heavily on your mental abilities as well. For example, football, soccer, and hockey players have to make thousands of split-second decisions, and any one of them can drastically impact the outcome of the game.

This means if you want to improve your athletic performance, you need to train your brain as well! Many of these devices take advantage of visual stimulants.

Performing mental exercises involves responding to the stimulant as quickly and accurately as possible. There are many sports vision training tools available that can improve your athletic performance, but Reflexion offers a proven and convenient array of exercises that are on the cutting-edge.

When you combine it with the ability to track your progress, you have a very powerful tool at your disposal.

Cognitive performance exercises are being done by professional athletes all over the world to help improve response times, visual accuracy, memory, and so much more.

You are what you eat, right? For some, improving athletic performance can be as simple as eating the right foods. Obviously, peak athletes are on much stricter diets than your average Joe. To push your body as far as it will go, you need to eat healthy foods at the right time.

It all starts in the morning. Instead of chowing down on sugary cereals and unhealthy fast breakfast foods, you need to eat a healthy supply of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats.

A hearty breakfast in the morning provides plenty of fuel for your muscles while also giving you the energy to start our day. Instead, go for healthier alternatives like complex carbohydrates.

Simple carbs, like high-fructose corn syrup and many ingredients in junk food, are notorious for causing that dreaded mid-day crash.

This results in a rapid blood sugar spike. Complex carbs like whole-wheat foods, wholesome vegetables, legumes, and more, break down a lot slower. This regulates your blood sugar and keeps your glycemic index relatively low. Knowing when to eat is also important.

A high-protein meal with complex carbs will fuel your workout. The goal of your post-workout meal is to replenish nutrients you lost and speed up the recovery process.

As we mentioned earlier, you lose a lot of stored energy during your workout. Plus, your muscles experience small micro-injuries.

To support your body, eat plenty of protein and complex carbs. Generally, a ratio of carbs to protein can do the trick. Supplements provide those important vitamins and minerals to keep all of your body functions in check.

Daily multivitamins are readily available at most grocery stores. They can provide you with a healthy dose of Vitamins A, C, D, E, B12, and more. Plus, they include essential minerals like iron, calcium, zinc, and magnesium. Healthy performance-enhancing supplements are perfectly safe and legal for you to use.

They can help you out during your workout and significantly increase your athletic performance. During your workout routine, ergogenic supplements are a good option. As if the time required to train for endurance activities wasn't enough, throw in the time required to prep and eat nutrient-dense foods to replenish energy and you quickly run out of hours in the day.

Thankfully, with the right supplement stack, you can shave some time off your prep time, boost your performance and recovery, and get on your way to crushing a new PR.

Here's our list of the top seven supplements endurance athletes should consider! Creatine supplementation and endurance exercise aren't typically linked in the same sentence. We think of creatine in terms of strength, speed, and power—and for good reason.

There are hundreds of published research studies supporting creatine's use as an effective ergogenic aid for improving muscular strength and size. While many will argue creatine has no place in an endurance athlete's supplement stack, we beg to differ.

If you can look past the direct effects of creatine—and increase in phosphocreatine stores, rapid increase in ATP production, and improved anaerobic performance—you'll see that creatine supplementation can offer indirect benefits to runners, cyclists, and triathletes , and help take their training to the next level.

Interval workouts at lactate threshold, speed work, and hill training are common—and often dreaded—techniques used to improve running efficiency and performance times.

The higher the quality of these sessions, the faster you'll be crossing the finish line. Creatine supplementation has been shown to decrease recovery time during repeated intervals, and increase power output at lactate threshold.

Recommended Dose: grams per day. Skip over the traditional loading phase often used with creatine supplementation. The initial weight gain, which is caused by an increase in total body water, may slow down performance.

Caffeine has long been used by endurance athletes to boost performance. Not only does it provide a quick pick-me-up for those early morning training sessions, but caffeine's ability to reduce perception of effort and help delay fatigue can make those longer runs more bearable. There have been numerous studies highlighting the benefits of caffeine consumption on endurance performance, including improvements in cycling and cross-country skiing performance, 8-kilometer run times, and faster time trials.

Since caffeine reaches its highest blood concentration in about an hour, we suggest taking it about 60 minutes before a race so it can help you power through a 5K or 10K—or even a marathon! And although caffeine is a diuretic—meaning that it increases urine production—a recent review article from researchers at the University of Connecticut Storrs suggested that caffeine consumption doesn't cause water-electrolyte imbalances or reduce exercise-heat tolerance.

Recommended Dose: 1. We know beta-alanine supplementation has been shown to improve performance and delay fatigue during high-intensity activity, but is this relevant to endurance athletes? Well, just because you're an endurance athlete doesn't mean you train exclusively at low-intensity exercise, right?

Tempo runs, race pace, and even lifting to improve running economy are all aspects of your training that'll benefit from beta-alanine supplementation.

In fact, several studies have found positive effects on endurance performance, including cycling performance and rowing times, with beta-alanine supplementation.

During highly intense training sessions, your body accumulates hydrogen ions. These hydrogen ions contribute to lowering pH, which ultimately results in fatigue.

Beta-alanine, an amino acid derivative, has been shown to increase intramuscular carnosine content, which can increase the body's ability to buffer hydrogen ions. This can potentially delaying fatigue and improve exercise performance, training volume, and reduce perceptions of fatigue.

Recommended Dose: grams per day, taken in milligram doses throughout the day to reduce the effects of paresthesia, a temporary tingling or numbness akin to when a limb falls asleep. Commonly used as a preservative for meats and other foods, sodium phosphate can now add "performance booster" to its resume.

Sodium phosphate loading has been shown to increase aerobic capacity and time to exhaustion by enhancing the ability of red blood cells to deliver oxygen to active muscles. Recommended Dose: grams per day, taken in single gram doses for days before an endurance event.

The study showed that consuming nitrate and polyphenol-rich foods has minor but significant benefits on endurance performance, such as improved performance in time trials, increased time to exhaustion, and better performance in intermittent tests. Among nitrate food sources, beetroot appears to be the most effective.

On the other hand, grapes, cherries , and pomegranates are the most effective polyphenol food sources. It is worth noting that there was no significant effect of nitrate or polyphenol consumption in females.

Additionally, despite its popularity, no significant effect was observed for the New Zealand blackcurrant. Consumption of L-citrulline did not impact endurance performance; however, only three studies were included for analysis, and all three studies used watermelon juice as the L-citrulline food source.

While more research is required, it seems that nitrate and polyphenol-rich foods may have a positive effect on endurance performance. A recent Instagram post has caught the attention of the football community.

The post shows the new novel bodycams that are set to make an impact on the English Premier League. Although the current rules prohibit the use of Bodycams in the Premier League, recent events suggest that a rule change is imminent.

In November, during the match between Tottenham and Wolves, one player from each team wore a Bodycam during the warm-up. Similarly, in July, players wore Bodycams during the Aston Villa and Newcastle match in the U. The Instagram post features a video clip showcasing the view from the Bodycam.

This video clip reveals the fascinating new perspective that fans are going to get from the Bodycam. It is worth checking out! Matt Tometz recently published an excellent video that provides a comprehensive review of the Run Rocket, which is a sprint resistance training tool.

Tometz highlights several pros of the Run Rocket, including its versatility, as it can be used in various directions, such as lateral or backward. He also mentions that the resistance provided by the Run Rocket is specific to sprinting and that the machine is portable and easy to move.

However, Tometz also discusses some cons and limitations of the Run Rocket. If you are interested in learning more about the Run Rocket, watching this video is a must.

Tometz is a writer for Science for Sport too and his blogs can be viewed here. Tometz has also been a regular guest on the Science for Sport podcast and his episodes listed below are well worth checking out!

SFS Academy is an all-access membership to premium sports science education. Get instant access when you join today on a 7-day free trial. Learn how to improve your athletes' agility. This free course also includes a practical coaching guide to help you design and deliver your own fun and engaging agility sessions.

As their muscular endurance for this exercise increases, they may wish to make the exercise more challenging by reducing rest times between sets, or increasing the reps per set, rather than increasing the load weight.

A person can apply the same principle of high rep and set volume, low—moderate load, and short rest periods to any exercise , such as bench presses, dumbbell curls, pushups, or squats.

People can choose exercises that suit their preferences and are challenging yet enjoyable enough to sustain training. As we have already mentioned, there are no specific exercises that are better for training muscular endurance than others. The design of a training program makes it suitable for endurance training.

However, ACE recommend the following exercises for building muscle endurance, which a person can perform at home without equipment:. A person can also work the tricep muscles more by placing their hands close together and turn them inward, so the fingers and thumbs form a diamond shape. To make the exercise easier, a person can place their hands on a bench or other stable, raised surface.

People can also modify a push up by placing the knees on the floor to make it easier, or lift one leg off the floor to make it more difficult. A person can modify this exercise by resting on the forearms instead of the palms if they find it challenging to hold the plank position with straight arms.

Cardiorespiratory endurance provides an indication of a person's physical fitness and measures how well the heart, lungs, and muscles perform during…. Methods of increasing stamina include meditation, exercise, and consuming caffeine.

Stamina can help prevent physical fatigue and enhance mental focus. These calisthenics workout plan progressions work for all fitness levels. Muscle dysmorphia can cause a preoccupation with building muscle and the belief that a person's muscles are smaller than they are.

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Medical News Today. Health Conditions Health Products Discover Tools Connect. The best way to train to improve muscular endurance.

Medically reviewed by Lauren Jarmusz, PT, DPT, OCS — By Beth Sissons on January 29, What it is Benefits Measuring endurance How to improve Training Preventing injury Summary Muscular endurance refers to how long muscles can sustain exercise.

What is muscular endurance? Benefits of muscular endurance training. How to measure muscular endurance. How to improve endurance.

Training for muscular endurance. Share on Pinterest. Preventing injury. How we reviewed this article: Sources. Medical News Today has strict sourcing guidelines and draws only from peer-reviewed studies, academic research institutions, and medical journals and associations.

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