By: Mujuthaba
It is necessary for a trainer to understand the basic functions of muscles. We all know that the combination of muscles and skeletons primarily bring movement to the body. Hence, muscular functions and capabilities should be known by the trainer.
I have come across a lot of people who confuse the terms muscular fitness, endurance and strength. When I translate these terms to Dhivehi, fitness is ‘hashiheyokan’, endurance is ‘bunvaru’ and strength is ‘baaru’. So obviously classification of the three terms should be different.
Catching up on the definitions might shed some light on classifying them. Muscular fitness is the collective term for muscular endurance and strength. They are the main functional definitions of the muscle. In which case, if you intend to test someone’s muscular fitness, s/he should be tested collectively for both muscular endurance and strength. Muscular fitness is also a component of the health-related physical fitness.
Muscular endurance is defined as the ability of a muscle group to continuously contract until it fatigues. In order to determine muscular endurance the muscle should repeatedly contract without rest. Examples are jogging, walking or running, where the muscles repeatedly contract to keep the body moving. To test someone for their muscular endurance, a one-minute push-ups test is usually conducted. The subject needs to perform the push-ups repeatedly without stopping. If the subject stops to rest, the test is terminated and the numbers of push-ups conducted are recorded.
Muscular strength on the other hand is known as the maximum force that can be generated by a muscle or muscle group. If the muscle contracts continuously (i.e. more than once), the determinant of muscular strength is lost. Strength test is usually done on a bench press, where maximal lift is conducted (1-RM test). Other modes of conducting muscular strength include the grip test and predicted 1-RM tests (for special populations and novice individuals).
I hope that this article has helped you understand and classify the difference between muscular strength, endurance and fitness. Make sure that if you are conducting a fitness test, you are able to differentiate if it is a strength or an endurance test. If unsure, just refer to it as one of the muscular fitness tests, although you need to know the difference.
4 comments:
Great post,
Agree with you, the terms should be understood by the trainers well beforehand.
It is quite surprising at the number of trainers who confuse these basic terms.
Good post bro. I've also recently stumbled on the different types of strengths, so I've reorganized my workouts to target the different areas of strength. This is including speed/explosive strength, which is somewhere between max & endurance strength I think, right?
Thallo: I'm glad to know that you are still training seriously. You need to be very careful on interpreting the definitions. Strength in itself is a training variable with endurance, power, speed and increasing size. Anywhere between strength and speed is power. So the term used to interpret speed/explosive strength would be ‘power’.
Remember that isolating the definition is crucial to determine the accurate training program (specificity), which, in the end will put you on the right track in achieving the goal.
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