View all slides | Contents of this slide

Lecture Notes

The next two components of health-related fitness are associated with muscular health. The first, muscular strength, is simply the amount of force a muscle can exert during a single, maximal effort. So in the picture here, you see the young woman with a very heavy barbell above her head. She likely just lifted that weight once, it's as much as she could do, and then put it back down. So that would be a great example of muscular strength. Compare that to muscular endurance, which is the ability of a muscle to exert repeated force against a resistance, or to sustain a muscular contraction for a period of time. So examples of muscular endurance might be how many push-ups or sit-ups an individual can complete in a 1-minute period. A great example, I think, of comparing the differences between muscular strength and muscular endurance is if you think about moving into a new apartment or a new house. In one instance you might need to move a very heavy piece of furniture just a very short distance; so let's say you move a big dresser across one of your rooms. But on the other hand, you might be carrying many smaller boxes into your new house or your new apartment over the period of a few hours. In the first case where you move the heavy piece of furniture, that would be a great example of muscular strength, and in the second case, muscular endurance would be needed to carry, repeatedly carry, those smaller loads into the house over a period of a couple hours. Both muscular strength and endurance can be improved through resistance training, and that resistance can really be delivered through many different items. In the example above it was delivered through boxes or furniture, but most often it's delivered through free weights, machines or even a person's own body weight.