Article Series

Aerobic Fitness and Endurance

Understand how aerobic training works, improve your fitness and develop the endurance to do more.

Aerobic exercise is one of the most effective ways to improve cardiovascular health. Good aerobic fitness is also strongly associated with longevity, making it an important part of staying healthy and active throughout life.

Whether your goal is to improve your general fitness, walk further, cycle faster or prepare for an endurance event, it helps to understand what aerobic training actually improves.

What improves when you train?

Aerobic training changes how your body responds to physical activity. Three closely related aspects of fitness are particularly useful to understand.

Aerobic capacity

Aerobic capacity describes how much oxygen your body can deliver to and use in your muscles during exercise.

With regular training, your heart can pump more blood with each beat, and your muscles become better at extracting and using oxygen. This helps you sustain more demanding physical activity.

VO₂ max is a common measure of aerobic capacity. Improving it can increase your capacity for sustained, vigorous exercise.

Read more: What Is VO₂ Max and Why It Matters and How to Improve Your VO₂ Max.

Endurance

Endurance is your ability to sustain an activity over time.

It depends on aerobic capacity, but also on the ability of your muscles to continue working, how efficiently you move, and how accustomed you are to a particular activity.

Someone training for a long walk, for example, needs more than a capable cardiovascular system. Their legs and feet must also become accustomed to spending longer periods moving.

Endurance develops through regular activity and gradually increasing the demands of the activity you want to sustain.

Exercise efficiency

As you become more accustomed to an activity, you may use less energy to maintain the same pace or effort.

This is partly due to improvements in aerobic conditioning, but technique and movement skill also matter. An experienced runner, for example, may use less energy at a given speed than someone new to running.

Better efficiency can make familiar activities feel easier and help you sustain them for longer.

These three aspects of fitness overlap, but understanding their differences helps explain why training produces a range of improvements.

Choosing the right approach

There isn't one aerobic training programme that suits every person or objective.

For general health and fitness

The priority is establishing a regular level of activity that supports cardiovascular health and can be maintained over time.

Walking, cycling, swimming and other aerobic activities can all contribute. The best choice is one that suits your circumstances and that you're willing and able to do consistently.

Our article How Often Should I Do Aerobic Exercise? explains recommended activity levels and how to establish an appropriate weekly target.

For greater aerobic capacity

Improving aerobic capacity involves placing an appropriate challenge on your cardiovascular system.

Both sustained aerobic exercise and more demanding training can contribute, with the balance depending on your current fitness and experience.

Our article How to Improve Your VO₂ Max explores the training approaches in greater detail.

For longer distances and better endurance

Preparing for longer walks, rides or runs involves gradually becoming accustomed to the demands of those activities.

Aerobic fitness remains important, but the muscles, movement patterns and duration involved in your chosen activity also influence performance.

For runners interested in comparing performance across distances, The Riegel Formula explains how results over one distance can be used to estimate another.

Explore the five articles

Each article takes one part of aerobic fitness further, from building a routine to understanding capacity and endurance performance.

Getting active and building a routine

Understanding and improving aerobic capacity

Exploring endurance performance

Turning the principles into a routine

Whatever your goal, improvement depends on regular activity and a training load that your body can adapt to.

The right amount and type of exercise will depend on your starting fitness, available time and the activities you enjoy.

Our article How to Build a Weekly Aerobic Training Plan takes you through the practical decisions: choosing activities, arranging sessions, allowing for recovery and making adjustments as you progress.

It also explains how to use optimal's Weekly Plan tools.

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