Exercises

Most people, when hoping to increase their endurance and stamina while working out, will often focus on cardio activities like running or cycling, but in truth this is only a small part of the endurance-building recipe. What most don’t realise is that it’s also necessary to increase strength, but these 7 training techniques will significantly boost your endurance and stamina.

1. Combine Strength Training with Cardio

In order to best challenge your heart and cardiovascular system, you should get as many muscles working as possible. Choosing cardio-only exercises will prevent you from building endurance, so it’s necessary to include strength days into your training. While most do cardio one day, and strength training on another, it’s a good idea to combine the two into one training day.

2. Reduce the Amount of Rest Time

While most men give themselves 30-90 seconds of recovery time between sets, if your goal is greater endurance and stamina, you will need to sacrifice some of this down time. Your muscles should be burning by the end of your sets and you should be breathing heavily and sweating – only take a break if you physically cannot continue.

Do a series of movements such as 10 each of pull-ups, squats, push-ups, and sit-ups and do 3 rounds back to back – breaking as minimally as possible.

3. Choose Fast-Paced, High Intensity Lifting

Using weights at an extremely rapid pace won’t necessarily increase your chances with sports betting NZ, but it will improve your strength and your endurance capabilities, as it’s one of the best ways to ignite your metabolism.

Doing an excessive amount of endurance-only training will actually slow down your metabolism as your body will start to eat away at muscle tissue.

4. Compound Movements Instead of Isolation

Examples of compound movements which require the use of more than one joint are squats, step-ups, push-ups, and pull-ups. These exercises will improve your endurance more than exercises which isolate specific muscle groups, such as bicep curls and leg lifts.

Isolated exercises aren’t going to stimulate your muscles enough to increase stamina.

5. Routine is Your Enemy

What many people don’t realise is that switching up your workout is the key to building endurance and stamina. The human body gets used to a workout routine after two weeks, so if you’re always running, try boxing instead. If you’re a cycling fanatic, switch it up by running stairs instead.

It’s important that you move your muscles in different ways to decrease the chances of developing overuse.

6. Say Yes to Hybrid Exercises

Hybrid exercises take two separate movements and combine them. Examples include: a ‘thruster’ is a squat with an added overhead press, jumping pull-ups, or lunges with bicep curls.

The more muscles you get working in one go, the more it will engage your heart muscles, which in turn improves your stamina.

7. Include Explosive Movements

If you’re looking to challenge your strength, endurance, and stamina simultaneously, it’s imperative that you include explosive movements which require a lot of energy. Once you become more explosive in your movements, you’ll notice that you actually start moving faster.

Try adding the following to your workout routine: burpees, box jumps, jumping knee tucks, and power push-ups.

Why Warm Ups Are Important

Completing a few warm up exercises is important for a number of reasons, from warming up your muscles to gradually increasing your heart rate. In fact, it can do a whole lot more for your body as well as your mind.

Whether you are going for a light jog around the block for the first time since high school, or you’re training for a marathon you’ve been planning to run for some time, a good warm up routine is imperative to ensure that you do your ultimate best, and avoid any injuries while doing so.

Always Be Prepared

Some solid advice in exercise and life in general, making sure you are always prepared is very important. It can be equated to driving your car in the dead of winter, where you have to warm up or you won’t get very far when you try to rev it up some considerably high speeds, and the same goes for exercising.

If you want to avoid pulling any muscles, you need to warm them up first. You have to prepare yourself physically if you want to ensure the best performance. This means gradually increasing your body temperature with a simple but effective warm up exercise.

Increase Your Blood Circulation

You’d be surprised at how important blood circulation is when engaging in a bit of exercise, regardless of how strenuous it may be. Just 5 or 10 minutes can help gradually increase the blood circulation in your muscles, ligaments and tendons.

Consider it like oiling a wheel that keeps squeaking, where you provide the many aspects of your physiology with a chance to start working together. With muscles warming up and helping you prevent injury and your ligaments and tendons increasingly becoming flexible, not warming up before working out would be a silly move.

Mental Warm Ups

Your mind is one of the most important aspects to any part of life, including something that appears as thoughtless as working out. This is especially true when getting involved in strenuous exercise that goes on for some time, such as a long hike or a marathon.

During these times your body will take on a lot of stress and adequate warm up activities actually help you deal with that stress a lot better. So, whether you’re referring to a 10km run, or in my case an afternoon spent playing online slots NZ from the comfort of my couch, being mentally prepared is imperative.

Warm Ups Vs. Stretching

Warm up exercising and stretching have often been grouped together, however, they are actually 2 very different principles in terms of proper exercising. While they are both very important in ensuring an optimal workout, warm up exercises increase your body temperature gradually and stretches are solely beneficial for your muscles.

Make sure you know the difference between the two, because stretching is not going to be enough for endurance sports and you very well may still end up with tears. The safest bet? Do both.

You just don’t want to be at the gym today doing exercises. Everything feels impossibly heavy, and you are simply going through the motions, gritting your teeth and counting the sets until you have done what you need to do and can leave.

It happens! I’ve had terrible workouts –sometimes once a week, sometimes more than that. Every so often I have to plod my way through a whole run of terrible workouts, feeling like I’m suffering some lower-grade poisoning with every session just dragging through without any real aim or purpose, and the only relief is when it’s over and my conscience lets me hightail it out of there.

Remember that Bad Workouts are to Be Expected

Bad workouts, like awful days at work, terrible ones at home, or a visit to the dentist, are normal occurrences. They are just one part of the game, and will always appear every now and then.

In fact, if you think about it, working out is meant to be hard work –that’s the point! Things that are easy are never with great rewards, and although these are fine and sometimes necessary to do, chances are they are not likely to amount to much.

Just like the big win at the sports betting sites available online –getting good is hard work, but the rewards are worth every moment of it.

Sacrificing Who You are for Who You Want to Be

The act of changing how your body is made up is a lot more intense when you think about it as a lot more than just losing fat or building muscle.

You are sacrificing who you are right now for whom you want to be in the future, and then making use of everything at your disposal in order to do so.

Forging a new self is a process of heat and fire, hammer and anvil, lighting crashing and thunder smashing, not simply changing your clothes, or getting a haircut.

Embrace the Difficult Days as Best You Can

Truth is, sometimes work outs are hellishly hard. Sometimes you have to just do them as best you can, and that is as it should be.

Woe to the man or woman that believes that things that don’t come naturally, or easily, are simply not meant to be done.

We see evidence of this mindset all the time –someone tries something new, flounders, brands themselves abysmal failures and quits.

Understanding that nothing meaningful happens easily or automatically is the first step towards getting through those bad days, and the simple truth is that everything takes a lot more time, effort, and gumption than we believe at the outset.

Lewis Carroll summed it up in Alice in Wonderland: we have to run as fast as we can in order to stay in place, and at least twice as fast if we want to get anywhere.

This is just a matter of fact: if it’s hard, chances are it is worth it. Struggling is the point, and how difficult the struggle is reveals how much your struggle is worth.

Core Skills and Fitness Rugby Training Drills

Rugby has been likened to a war game, with tactics and game play being backed up by core skills and fitness. To excel at the game, one needs a balance of the two. In this article, we will look at a  few key fitness and core skills exercises which can be conducted both on and off the field. Enter rugby training drills.

Most of them involve the ball, which is a great motivator as many players find ball work much more rewarding than pure fitness training. Please note that these exercises are for a pair of players, not individual work.

Rugby training drills are an important part of improving yourself and your team. Many of the rugby sites online which offer these rugby training drills will also offer some NRL betting tips for those who have a real love of the game, and are eager sports bettors

Truck And Trailer

This exercise improves both cornering and ball passing in tight spaces.

• Draw a small square on the frilled using tape or chalk, about 5 meters by 5 meters.
• The “truck”, runs around the square as a balanced but fast pace, while the “trailer” tries to stay as close behind him as possible.
• While running, small pop passes between the two should occur
• Keep this going for one minute intervals with 2 minutes rest in between.

Relay Races

Much of the game relies on a sudden burst of speed and power in order to score a try, or catch a ball. Although relay races are common enough to be played at most high school athletics meets, they make a great rugby exercise too.

• Set up two cones about 50 meters apart
• Each player has to race around the cone carrying the ball and pass it to the other player when they reach the start again.
• This can be done by more than one team to add to the competitive edge or involve a third person to time you to see if you can improve.

Bending Poles

Bending poles or agility poles are a great way to improve balance as well as speed and agility. Being able to alternate your weight to each foot is imperative to this exercise.

• Set up a series of poles which are either solid into the ground or in buckets filled with sand, about 2 meters apart.
• Each player has to run down the line of the poles, weaving in and out as one would do in a slalom ski course.
• Time the runs to see who is the fastest and whether you improve or not.
• This can be extended by setting up two courses and carrying the ball throughout the course.

Continuous Defending

This exercise requires three players. In this set of rugby training drills both speed and tactics play a part, increasing the core skills of tackling and dodging. No equipment is needed other than a ball and the three players.

• Two players have to beat one defender by drawing and passing between themselves,
• Initially, the defender tackles by using a two handed touch, although this can be extended to proper tackling for more advanced players.
• As soon as the player’s score, the initial ball carrier becomes the defender, the scorer becomes the initial ball carrier, and the defender becomes the support player.
• This continues for 30 seconds to a minute, with 2-minute breaks in between.

 

Today’s modern lifestyle makes sitting around and not exercising all that much easier. Growing trends towards getting off the couch are sweeping the world, however, along with little gadgets which claim to make your exercise time that much easier and fun.

Smart Watches, Your Fitness Friend On Your Arm

The smart watch is one such gadget. Falling into the smart device family, this little piece of technology is light, easily transported and always available. It can do all sorts of incredible things, such as answer phone calls, display messages, and of course, track your fitness goals and experiences. The Apple watch is one of the most popular smart watches aroudn today, as is Samsung’s competitor to the Apple watch, the Samsung Gear 3.

Motivation By Your Side

No one likes exercising alone, especially if they are just trying to get into it. The smart watch can help here, as it is almost like having an exercise partner with you all the time. You can set your goals on your watch when you are feeling particularly motivated, and your little friend will remind you of them at regular intervals.

Your watch can be used to play music to you while you sweat, or even say little motivational insights to keep you going. One can even access an online sports betting guide, read up on a few stats and take a breather while placing a bet on your favourite team.

It will track your steps, tell you when you have done well, announce how many calories you have burned, and even tell you what to eat post workout.  Stefan Olander, Vice President of Digital Sport at Nike says that sports trackers are extremely motivational and has quoted: “There’s incredible power in knowing how you’re doing”

The Flip Side To “Tracking”

As much as knowing how you are doing is incredibly motivating, the flip side to this is becoming more and more common. Over tracking is becoming an obsession whereby people use their smart watches to track their every movement.

This can cause one to become obsessed with one factor of fitness to the detriment of an overall healthy lifestyle.  Joshua Klapow, PhD is a clinical psychologist from the University of Alabama.

He has studied the effect of smart watches and other fitness tracking devices and warns: “You can get so caught up in tracking that it overtakes you emotionally and psychologically…Over tracking syndrome can be problematic when the behaviour you’re trying to engage in becomes secondary to the numbers.”

The Social Network Aspect

Sharing your progress on your personal fitness journey with your friends can be motivating in itself. As envisioned by technology visionaries like Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs, it’s important that devices help people connect. That’s why many smart watches allow you to automatically update and share any exercise achieved, such as runs or even simple workouts. Sharing anything on the web, even to your close friends, opens you up to judgment.

Let’s face it, most people judge others even if they don’t realise it. When you are doing well, and sharing your progress the positive comments can help to spur you on to even greater heights and achievements. There is nothing like feedback from real people to motivate you into reaching your goal.

Unfortunately, like everything else in the world, this has a flip side too. Regular updates may peter out if you lose motivation, which may have a spiral effect on your psyche.

Knowing that your updates are fewer and further between may make you feel like a failure, thus perpetuating the cycle of being demotivated even more.

So, What’s The Verdict on Smart Watches?

In summary we can be safe to say that a smart watch can be both a help and a hindrance, depending totally on how you use it and let it affect you.

For many Australians their busy lifestyle leaves little time for relaxation or exercise and after a while the fast-pace may get a little hard to bear.  Day to day pressures can build, stress and illness become a regular occurrence and a general feeling of being run down can become prevalent if you don’t take the time to relax, unwind, exercise and try and create a balance in your life.

The importance of a balanced lifestyle is often underrated but by maintaining your health, fitness and peace of mind you’ll feel far better and benefit from being energised and in control. It may be a challenge to create  a balance but managing your daily activities and making time for exercise and recreation will lead to a better quality of life overall.

These tips for living a balanced lifestyle will assist you emotionally, physically and mentally and are designed to set you on the path to happiness, fitness and fulfilling your full potential.

Exercise Regularly

Being unfit can have a number of negative effects on your body and not only does exercise improve your physical health, it’s also mentally very good for you. Taking the time to visit a gym, go for regular walks, swim or enjoy a yoga class will have short term and long term benefits and will leave you looking and feeling great. By setting aside time for exercise you’ll build up you fitness and avoid burnout. Australia has a number of excellent gyms and plenty of beautiful scenery, so you can choose to enjoy the great outdoors or work out under the guidance of a fitness instructor.

Make Time for Fun

This may sound a little unspontaneous but setting aside time for recreational activities is essential to your well-being. The benefits of relaxing and having fun are numerous and one of the preferred recreational activities for many busy adults is online gambling. With the abundance of online casino Australia sites that cater to enthusiastic players it’s even easier to sit back and relax in the comfort of your own home, as these casinos allow you to enjoy all your favourite games whenever you desire. Ideal for keeping you amused and entertained, this is just one of the many activities that can be enjoyed and add value to your down time.

Follow a Healthy Diet

Staying fit, exercising regularly and enjoying recreational activities are a great start but it’s also important that you eat healthily and follow a diet that’s packed full of nutrients and vitamins. If you are working out regularly you’ll also need to ensure that your body is getting enough fuel and that you are following an eating plan that’s healthy and wholesome. Eating well will give you more energy and ensure that you can tackle whatever life throws at you head on.

Adjust your Mind-set

If you get stressed out easily, find it hard to motivate yourself when you feel overwhelmed or never seem to have time for yourself, you need to adjust your mind set and create an efficient schedule that allows you to enjoy all the benefits of a healthy, balanced lifestyle. Recharging your batteries, getting enough exercise and coping with whatever life throws at you without incurring too much stress are all part of managing your mind set in a positive manner.

A well balanced life style will ensure you enjoy every minute to the full and whether you want to play online casino games, hit the gym or go for a walk, creating equilibrium is essential.

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