Improving your Fitness: How to Train Endurance

Building endurance not only aids overall health, but it also makes workouts easier and more enjoyable. 

Murph is coming in just a few months. Summer will be here before we know it, packed with numerous opportunities to participate in longer races. This is a time of year to challenge ourselves and test our fitness; a big part is improving our overall endurance. 

Endurance is crucial for CrossFit and improving our fitness. It is not just about doing long workouts. It is about learning to pace, increasing our ability to recover, and being the most efficient we can be during a workout. 

Aerobic vs. Anaerobic Exercise

Before discussing how to improve our endurance, we need to understand the two energy systems we want to train. We incorporate both types of training into CrossFit, and endurance in each means something a little different. 

Aerobic (with oxygen) effort can be sustained over time. It is typically performed at lower intensities for longer durations. This includes running, rowing, biking, and long AMRAP-style workouts. 

Developing aerobic capacity helps you maintain a steady pace and keep working over time. 

Anaerobic (without oxygen) effort is our more high-intensity work. Think of sprinting, max-effort Echo Bike intervals, or heavy barbell cycling. It can only be sustained for a short period of time. However, with improved endurance, we can recover faster from these efforts and push ourselves past the point of burnout. 

When we talk about endurance, we want to train our endurance in both these places. But how can we do that?

Building an Aerobic Base

Long aerobic work can be beneficial in building a base for fitness. It does not have to be fast, and long can mean different things to different people.

If you struggle with workouts that get closer to that 20-minute mark, try mixing in a few 20-30-minute slow cardio sessions each week. Go into these without expectations. Work out at a pace you can easily keep a conversation going.

If you don’t like the thought of monotonous work for that long, you can mix in some EMOMs at that same slow pace. Choose four to five movements to rotate through for a 30-minute EMOM (Every Minute On the Minute). 

Interval Training and Recovery

Interval training is a great tool for training our anaerobic system and pushing out that threshold. Start with something simple: 

Work at a hard pace for 1 minute on a machine or run. Then rest or walk for a minute. 

If you don’t do a lot of interval work, adding 10-20 minutes of this can be a great place to start. After you get comfortable with 1 minute of work, increase the intervals to 2 or 3 minutes. 

You can also mix in intervals like the following:

With these intervals, you should speed up as the time goes down. The rest is there to allow for partial recovery. These are not all-out efforts with full recovery time. This is teaching your body to recover fast and hit another high-intensity effort. 

If you want to improve your speed, you can mix 20-second intervals with longer periods of rest. This allows you to push for a near-max-effort pace.

Whatever interval training works for you, realize that it has a different purpose than a long run or zone 2 work. You need to push yourself hard, but not so hard that you lose speed before your interval is up. That is where pacing comes into play. 

Learning to Pace and increasing endurance

Pacing is an important part of a workout. To get the maximum benefit of the workout, you want to achieve the intended stimulus. That means pacing the workout just right for the time domain given. 

The more you do interval and long-duration work, the more you will find the best way to pace for each workout. 

When we have those longer-duration workouts, you do not want to start fast. Your starting pace should feel almost easy, but by the end, it should be hard (but attainable) to hold.

Everyone is different when it comes to pacing a workout. The only way to find what works for you is to experiment. However, there are a few tips to remember when looking at those longer workouts. 

• Break longer workouts into manageable chunks: For example, if a workout is 20 minutes long, mentally break it down into 5-minute chunks. Hold your pace for the 5 minutes and see if you can keep it up for the next one. 
• Focus on rhythmic breathing: On longer workouts, ensure you can still breathe easily at the start. Keep your breath under control, and push the pace in the last 80% of the workout if you feel good. 
• Break up movements when needed: If you are doing a long workout with lots of wall balls (for example), decide if breaking the reps into small, manageable sets will help you keep your pace for longer. Every workout will be different, and you may approach certain movements differently than others. 

Pacing will be something you learn over time, but you do need to be intentional with your workouts to see those results. 

Put the work into learning to pace, working for more extended periods, and mixing in dedicated interval work, and you will see considerable improvements in your overall fitness endurance.