3 ways to improve your stamina for over 50s

Stamina is the physical or mental energy required to complete strenuous activities.

Are you tired of lacking stamina or do you fear that you will lose stamina in your later years? You’re not alone.

Participating in regular exercise and fitness activities builds stamina and strength. As our body becomes more efficient, exercise and everyday activities not only become easier, they become more enjoyable.

Regular exercise engages something called overload. Challenging and overloading our body helps us adapt and improve our physical functionality and increases the efficiency of our body systems. This creates more stamina, which helps our body perform longer and better.

Exercise doesn’t always need to be boring and strenuous, activities such as playing tennis or working in the garden, dancing, golfing, swimming, carrying heavy shopping, or playing with energetic children, will help improve your body’s physical stamina, so will functional fitness programs.

Essentially, if you don’t use it you will lose it. So here are some top tips for improving your stamina.

Do Hybrid and or Compound Exercises

Doing an exercise that works several muscles and not just one muscle is a compound exercise. And doing an upper body movement whilst simultaneously performing a lower body movement, is a hybrid exercise. Including these in your workout will help improve the stamina of your whole body, instead of just particular parts. A good methodology is to train the movement and not the muscle. So instead of training one particular muscle such as the biceps or hamstring we train a movement that will require the use of a number of muscles working together to perform the action.

Vary your workouts

Only doing aerobic exercises such as cycling or swimming are great for your cardiovascular system, but they will leave you deficient in other areas such as strength and balance. Combining various forms of exercise, such as a functional fitness programs and aerobic exercise will challenge your body in several areas of fitness such as strength, balance, aerobic fitness, flexibility and coordination, and increase your overall stamina.

Always challenge yourself

Doing the same exercise over and over with the same weight, duration and rest time will limit your progression. By experimenting with the weight, duration and rest time you will always be challenging your body, allowing it to adapt and improve. Changing programs and implementing new exercises also helps to stimulate our brain and increase our overall ability to adapt to new situations.

IMPORTANT LEGAL INFO This article is of a general nature and FYI only, because it doesn’t take into account your personal health requirements or existing medical conditions. That means it’s not personalised health advice and shouldn’t be relied upon as if it is. Before making a health-related decision, you should work out if the info is appropriate for your situation and get professional medical advice.