Let’s start with the health aspect: Don’t just focus on endurance or just strength.
How do strength and endurance sports work individually and combined?
Endurance sports only:
- (Plus): Strengthens the cardiovascular system
- (Minus): Without weight training you lose muscle. Endurance exercise, calorie deficit and, most importantly, the combination of both actually accelerates muscle loss in a time without weight training
- (Minus): As you lose muscle through endurance exercise, you become more unstable over time, which increases joint wear and tear
- (Minus): Pure endurance sports make your metabolism more efficient, meaning your body learns to get by on fewer calories. This means that you are moving into a downward spiral in your calorie needs and have to eat less and less if you want to lose weight or just not gain weight. The body even begins to protect fat reserves, so the result goes towards skinny fat and any deviation, be it less exercise or more eating, is immediately punished with massive weight gain.
Strength training only:
- (Plus): Depending on the intensity, muscle retention or muscle gain, but definitely an increase in strength, since even light training with muscle retention trains muscle recruitment in the brain
- (Plus) Maintaining or building muscle means that you are generally more stable and therefore your joints wear less, which rewards you in old age by being more stable and mobile than peers who have not done any strength training throughout their lives
- (Plus): Tightens the tissue around the trained muscles, meaning abdominal muscle training makes the stomach tighter, so that you look and are significantly slimmer even with the same body fat percentage
- (maybe a plus): There have been studies that suggest that the adage “you can’t burn fat locally” may not be entirely true, but that people who were in a calorie deficit (without that you can’t burn fat) and did ab workouts burned more belly fat than those who just did “any” exercise, whether general strength only without abs, or endurance (who are more likely to actually gain belly fat).
- (Plus): From a metabolic point of view, strength training increases the insulin sensitivity of the muscles, which prevents adult-onset diabetes, has a higher 24-hour calorie requirement than endurance sport (endurance uses more during training, but afterwards the metabolism immediately falls back to idle, while it remains high for 24 hours after strength training) and generally keeps the metabolism higher, since strength is hormonally more of a work/fight mode where you have to use maximum energy, while endurance is hormonally more of an escape mode where you have to be maximally energy efficient
- (Neutral): It also gets your heart rate up, although not as much as endurance sports, which means it also helps the cardiovascular system, but it can be a little more.
A well-mixed training plan of strength and endurance
- (Huge plus): Combines all the advantages of strength and endurance, without the disadvantages of the individual disciplines
- (Additional plus): The sports complement each other: While the increased endurance through endurance training helps you in the strength discipline, the improved body awareness, the improved muscle recruitment by the brain, the increased strength and thus stability in endurance training help you to be more efficient and therefore more enduring
- (Additional plus): Used cleverly (with alternating strength and endurance days), it improves regeneration and can even increase muscle growth for anyone who wants to build muscle and trains with a correspondingly high intensity
Now you may be a little afraid of weight training because you don’t want to get too muscular or because when you think of weight training you still think of the gym (yes, it’s boring, I’m with you).
But the fact is, depending on the intensity, strength training helps you to protect your muscles (that’s the least you owe to your health), to build a little muscle or to build more muscle (which would mean we’re in the gym again). For example, if you’re a climber (it’s a strength endurance sport, i.e. one in which you use enormous amounts of strength, but rather for a long time and evenly and not to muscle failure, rather than in muscle building mode with short units until muscle failure) or recreational acrobats such as calisthenics athletes who do skill training (i.e. stuff like the human flag), gymnasts or aerial artists (who work on the pole, the vertical sheet or the If you look at the aerial hoop performer, they are typically slim, you can see slight muscle attachments, but they don’t look like Schwarzenegger – in other words, they have quite aesthetic, light muscles that don’t ruin your femininity.
Of course, a gym like this has the advantage that you have machines with which you can shape your butt particularly well. This is also muscle training, in this case actually a form of bodybuilding (or regionally limited body part building).
In the end, it’s important that you enjoy it – so just be creative and try things out, although your train of thought can sometimes get tangled up – if you used to get into fights in the schoolyard and now play chess, try chess boxing (yes, it really exists).
But more seriously… Let’s take the endurance part. Why don’t you want to jog? Too strenuous? Sorry, but nothing is coming from anything. Too boring? I’m totally with you, but running is also an interesting sport, either in a “team runs after the ball” sport or, for example, in parkour or freerunning. You can also integrate jogging or cycling into your everyday life, e.g. everyday routes by bike and a detour on the way home (or on the way, where it’s more suitable, if you’re shopping, probably on the way there), if you use public transport, get off a few stops earlier and jog home or inline skating… But you can also take part in courses such as dance courses, especially at a faster pace (and if Zumba is still too easy for you and you don’t sweat, do Irish dancing, that brings everyone under the oxygen tent), go swimming or jump on the trampoline.
And when it comes to strength, I’ve already given a few examples of those that you can do without fear of becoming too muscular, regardless of whether it’s climbing/bouldering, where you’ll have both strength and stamina pretty damn good, or acrobatic sports like calisthenics, aerial sports disciplines like pole dancing (as a man, I do that too), aerial hoop or vertical gymnastics, equipment and floor exercises, … It’s all a lot of fun (at least in adulthood, when you no longer have the pressure of competition or school grades but do it as a hobby and always unlock new skills) and it makes you very strong without making you overly muscular.
Of course, there are many others in both categories, strength and endurance – just search and try them out, but make sure that you somehow cover both aspects.
