Muscular Endurance

Muscular Endurance- Muscular endurance is your muscles ability to withstand some sort of weight/force/pressure over a long period of time. Muscular endurance could be considered aerobic due to the time taken but muscular endurance can be improved despite training in the anaerobic energy system (weightlifting requires 15+ reps to train which won’t take longer than 2 minutes, you can also work for hours and hours on muscular endurance whilst doing cardio as well, hence why marathon runners have very defined muscles instead of just being very skinny). Oxygen is needed for the body to metabolise fat which is important for an endurance athlete whose event lasts longer than 2 minutes. An athlete with good muscular endurance will have larger glycogen

Agility is very useful for sports such as basketball, football and rugby as the athlete may need to change direction without a loss in speed to avoid the opposition. The more agile you are, the better the brain is at sending messages to the correct nerves which tell the muscles what to do. Agility can train power as you are moving at high speed and cardiovascular endurance as you may be doing intervals on say an agility ladder.

Good training methods to train agility include agility ladders at a high intensity. A good test for agility would be the Illinois agility test but this may be unreliable as it also requires good sprinting speed and acceleration. Another good test includes the hexagon agility test but this requires good coordination.

Balance-Balance is defined as your ability to stay upright or in control of your movements, it differs from coordination as coordination is your body’s ability to move 2 or more muscle groups simultaneously as smoothly as possible. There are two types of balancing; static (staying still) and dynamic (moving.) The vestibular system in the ear is very important for balance as well as the muscles working to stay in the same place or to stay upright. Our bones are vital to staying upright. When training balance you may see other increases in components such as muscular endurance and flexibility depending on the type of exercise you’re doing (say you’re stretching, like trying to work your way in to the splits, you would need balance to avoid falling over as well as with lunges, without balance you’d just fall