A lot of people out there get a few popular athletic words mixed up. For example, many people don’t know that there is a difference between strength and power. Strength is your ability to move heavy weight while power is your ability to move that strength with speed. Many people don’t know the difference between speed and quickness. Speed is a measurement of your top velocity, while quickness is how fast you can get up to that speed. The same goes for endurance and stamina. And while they are related, they are very different.
Endurance
Endurance is your ability to sustain a cardiovascular activity for a long period of time. An example of a cardio activity would include swimming, jogging, biking and walking. And while these activities do require some degree of exertion, they don’t not require a lot of muscular strength.
There are plenty of ways to increase endurance. You could go for a long run, swim every morning before work or school, or simply enjoy a long walk. But if cardio endurance is not required by your sport of choice, then it may be a better idea to develop endurance in different ways. You could do a series of lifts with a minimum of rest or do a series of plyometric exercises.
Stamina
Stamina is your ability to sustain effort for a long period of time. And this effort usually requires a lot of muscular work. Stamina can refer to your ability to get up off the offensive line of scrimmage to block or it can refer to your ability to throw 100 pitches in a game. Stamina is best developed with repeated lifts and explosive exercises. Stamina is more of an anaerobic approach to endurance, where you exert yourself to the point of breathing heavy in a short period of time.
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