There are 5 main components of fitness. They include cardiovascular endurance, muscular strength, body composition, flexibility, and muscular endurance. Most people trying to improve their overall fitness will focus on one or two of these components. However, there’s another factor in fitness that shouldn’t be ignored, and that is stamina.

Stamina allows individuals to sustain physical activity over a longer period of time. While some may confuse endurance with stamina, they aren’t the same thing. In today’s article, we will go over some of the best ways to improve your stamina in smart and realistically manageable ways.

Whether you’re an Olympic level athlete or just started exercising, practicing these tips should help increase your stamina in no time!

Take Longer Walks

This sounds incredibly simple, but it works effectively. If you’ve had trouble sustaining your workouts or can’t increase their intensity, add a long walk or jog to your workout. Walking daily at a decent pace for 30 minutes to an hour can improve your stamina, especially if you’re a beginner.

For more advanced individuals, add running intervals to your walk so you can adjust the intensity of the workout. Add a 20 to 30-second sprint after every 5 minutes in your walk. If that still doesn’t seem right, adjust your speed and intensity according to your fitness levels. However, regular long walks will quickly improve your stamina.

Increase Reps in Weight Training

When working with weights, don’t aim for the heaviest possible weights available. Instead, you should aim to increase the volume of reps you do. Even if you’re working with lighter weights, building stamina is all about being able to work over the long haul without tiring out. Increasing the number of reps you do per set, even by a small amount, builds stamina.

The next time you feel like you can go up a level in the weights you’re currently lifting, try increasing the reps or sets you do instead of going to the next heaviest weight available.

Isometric Exercises

Start doing exercises that don’t require your muscles to move around, but force you to stay in a position for long periods of time. Wall sits, or planks are a great example of this. Isometric exercises train your body to sustain muscle strain for longer periods of time.

As an Olympian and the first Black skeleton athlete from Africa, I know the importance of being able to keep moving when you feel like you can’t go any further. Having the stamina to keep giving it my all allowed me to go from being another Ghanaian sprinter to Ghana’s first skeleton athlete. I am Akwasi Frimpong, and you can learn all about my story here.