The world of fitness has grown rapidly over past years, with new training methods and styles constantly being released in search of the most efficient and promising type of training. Now in this popular age of fitness culture we can see a wide variety of gyms and health clubs all over the world targeting different training systems surrounding different training goals and pursuits. With such a wide variety of options out there, we thought we’d take a deeper look into two of the biggest and most popular training systems out there, strength and endurance.
But before we can take a look into the biggest difference between the two, we must first look at the origin of fitness from a historical perspective to better understand it’s purpose and evolution over the years. Unknown to many, the world of fitness dates back far before Jazzercise in the 70’s. When looking at fitness from the start of time we can recognise aspects of highly fit individuals even during the primal times where peak fitness was necessary for survival. Fitness became increasingly popular during ancient Greek times, where military and warrior training was popular (e.g the Spartans). However, gymnastics, (which is a strength based pursuit) was really the first branch of fitness and its popularity exploded particularly during the 1800’s. With growth since then, fitness has reached new pinnacles and expanded across many different avenues with different pursuits in mind, two of the biggest: strength and endurance.
Now that we have a better understanding of the history of fitness and it’s evolution over generations, we can also take a look at what endurance and strength training involves and discover what truly separates them from each other to understand what type of person might be better suited to each training system. But ultimately, it’s all to do with their energy systems, to better understand this let’s take a look at their definitions:
Muscle strength sports generally focus on generating the most amount of power in the least amount of time working on explosiveness through energy release, sports such as Weightlifting, American Football, Rugby etc. Usually with sports working in 0-8s margin, the energy system being used predominantly is the ATP-PCr system, now in theory all 3 systems are being used to some extent during a wide time margin (0-60), however at incremental phases, a separate energy system will be used more than another. The role of the ATP-PCr system is provide the fastest supply of energy to the body and can operate without oxygen which is why it is said to be anaerobic (we will discuss this in more detail later).
Muscle endurance however to the best of our knowledge takes place roughly after 90s of continuous training and predominantly utilizes the aerobic-oxidative energy system allowing a training individual to perform activity for a longer sustained duration e.g: long distance running/swimming/cycling. Additionally the aerobic-oxidative system uses oxygen to facilitate it’s reaction allowing an athlete to work at a high capacity but lower power output.
To target the ATP-PCr or glycolytic or oxidative systems, very different training is required in regards to power and capacity. In addition to this, the energy used for their reactions are very different and can only be accessed at specific time intervals, which is why it is almost impossible to equally train all three systems simultaneously. Knowing this we are able to distinguish sports by their skill base, both strength and endurance based athletes are trained individuals and share equal training effort/commitment however they do require separate training programs as they work different energy systems and someone who has highly trained system in one of the three systems will perform best in the sport which uses that system most. In some cases, there are sports which display a crossover between the three training systems. One example of this is football which requires short bursts of speed but also requires endurance. We suggest that the best approach is to understand the difference in training required for strength and endurance and how they target each system differently to better understand which system you are working more.
If you found this post insightful, why not check out some of our previous posts on our blog page or if you are interested in becoming a qualified personal trainer check out our main page for course information. For more information about our blogs and training courses, please email us at info@focusfitnessuk.com.
Written by Daniyal Siddiqui.