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Those fibers inhabit the range between the ST and FTb and are where this muscular endurance training effect takes place. These attributes allow them to provide the crucial base of aerobic support for higher intensity work done by FTa fibers. They are surrounded by more dense capillary beds, along with a much higher mitochondrial mass.

They have a smaller cross section (generate lower force and are much less likely to thicken with hypertrophy training). Once again, as with all endurance, it comes down to those unglamorous ST fibers. Two endurance sports where extra muscle mass is less of a detriment are swimming and rowing/paddling. These are two very big reasons why the best endurance athletes in sports that require the athlete to support and carry his or her body weight against gravity tend to be smaller/lighter framed and not built like Power Lifters. Hypertrophy is a negative adaptation for an endurance athlete who has to not only carry that extra muscle mass around but also has to use valuable oxygen to keep those muscle cells alive.

This is the property called hypertrophy sought by body builders. While training for max strength improves the contractile force of all the muscle’s fibers, both ST and FT, it is the FTb fibers that get the biggest training stimuli and they respond by becoming even thicker in cross section. Their thicker cross section means oxygen has farther to perfuse to get to those fewer mitochondria. They have poor endurance due to much lower mitochondrial (the aerobic or endurance engine of a cell) density than the endurance disposed Slow Twitch fibers. The largest cross section, most forceful (i.e., strongest) Fast Twitch fibers called FTb need to be recruited to generate maximum muscle force and do not have good endurance. Real world observation easily dispels that notion. If the above held true and it was really that simple, Olympic weight lifters or Power Lifters would have the greatest muscular endurance. Why Just Being Stronger is Not The Answer From that italicized sentence above you might infer the following: Increase the muscle’s max strength and you have a greater strength reserve and potential to increase the muscular endurance. They’re trained using the same principle. They’re the same quality, just differing in intensity. So, the muscular endurance needed by a rock climber to power through a 10 move crux is going to be different that the muscular endurance a mountain runner out for many hours at a time will need. The higher the percentage of the muscles’ maximum force, the fewer the repetitions that muscle will be able to make before it fatigues. How high a percentage and for how many repetitions are relative terms. The ability of a muscle to exert a relatively high percentage of its maximum force for many repetitions of the propelling movement. Legendary Russian coach and exercise scientist Yuri Verkhoshansky’s definition is widely accepted:

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While some specifics change depending on the sport, these two underlying principles are applicable across this range, and in fact the full range, of endurance sports. What I have done is develop protocols for their use in different forms with alpinists, mountaineers, mountain runners, ski mountaineers and Olympic Cross Country skiers.

I didn’t invent either of these ideas and I didn’t invent the combination of them. If you grasp these concepts well you can stop reading right here. There are two key components to the training methods I have developed Build a big aerobic base Layer Muscular Endurance on top of thatīoom, there you have it! Do those things and you are 90% of the way toward having some of your best mountain performances. Careful readers will even notice some differences between this and earlier writings I’ve done on this subject. Having had to explain ME training hundreds of times, in this article I pull together all that experience to produce my current thinking on the subject in one article. Articles like Vertical Beast Mode that remain on explain it as it relates to Mountaineers and Alpinists. Both Training for the New Alpinism and Training for the Uphill Athlete have entire sections of the book devoted to the topic. Over the past 20 years I’ve written and spoken many thousands of words about Muscular Endurance training.

Muscular endurance rest time