Muscular Endurance Phase
So we have completed our initial mobility assessment and have gone through our 4-6 weeks of the preparatory phase. Hopefully we have gotten to the point where our muscles don’t get very sore (maybe a little but not the “I can’t walk” amount of sore) after a gym workout. If so, we have given our muscles and tendons time to acclimate to this new, or maybe forgotten since last winter, form of exercise. Our muscles and tendons are ready for more work!
The first task of the muscular endurance phase is to perform the mobility assessment again. Just because we have worked on our mobility doesn’t mean it has improved or improved enough to give us our green light for certain exercises. Maybe your shoulder mobility has improved and you can reach higher above your head but it still isn’t high enough to overhead press safely. It is important to reassess and find your new baseline. Keep on working on the areas that need the attention!
The exercises you do in the muscular endurance phase will be at least similar, and maybe even the same, as in the preparatory phase. The main difference is that you’ll be using more weight/resistance now that your muscles are ready for it and we will have less recovery time between sets for each muscle group. Before, you may have been performing a circuit of a bunch of exercises back to back to back. You may have been doing your pull, push, knee, core, and then hip exercise all in a row for example. That means that you had four exercises to do before you got back to your second set of your pull exercise. This could be minutes between each pull set.
Here in our muscular endurance phase we want to have 30-60 seconds between sets for each muscle group. This means that you might want to only pick one strength exercise to do at a time. Maybe you do a set of squats, 30-60 seconds of a mobility exercise, a second set of the squats, 30-60 seconds of a mobility exercise, and then a third set of the squats. You could also superset two exercises together. That means you will do your push, pull, push, pull, push, pull exercises in that order. This will only work if you can continuously move from push to pull with very little or no rest between. As soon as you finish one set you’ll move right into the next set. Any more than two exercises at once will be too long of a rest for our goal.
So here is what we are looking for during the muscular endurance phase:
2-3 strength workouts per week
12-20 repetitions of each exercise, finding muscle fatigue with the weight that we lift or option or level we choose. For exercises that are time on task (like planks) up to 1 minute will work. Muscle failure means you couldn’t possibly do one more repetition even if someone said they’d give you $100 to do one. Fatigue means you have one more rep in you if you had to do it. Going to failure all the time will not be good in the long run. Too much fatigue. If you go to muscle failure on the first set good luck doing many repetitions on the second set or any on the third! Feel the burn not the failure.
3 sets of each movement (push, pull, knee, hip, core)
30-60 seconds between each exercise for each muscle group (push, pull, knee, hip, core)
