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Lecture Notes

Before we talk about the anatomy of muscles and the benefits of having muscular fitness, let's review very quickly the definitions between muscular strength and muscular endurance. You'll remember that each of these is a component of health-related fitness, and muscular strength really deals with the ability of a muscle to exert a single maximum effort, compared to muscular endurance where the muscle or muscle group is asked to exert a repeated force against a resistance or sustain a muscular contraction for a longer period of time. So muscular strength, you can think about lifting something, one time, something as heavy as you can. Muscular endurance would be doing repeated efforts of that muscular endurance. Muscular endurance, again, be careful not to confuse that with cardiorespiratory fitness; that's a different concept altogether. Muscular endurance, for example, would be doing a sit-up test for a minute to see how many sit-ups you could do.