How to Improve Your Stamina When You Feel Out of Shape

Feeling winded after climbing the stairs? These tips will help!

“Did I always get this winded climbing up the stairs?”

“Why can’t I take a walk and carry on a conversation at the same time without getting out of breath?”

For many people, realizing that their stamina isn’t what it used to be is the wake-up call they need to start working out. When you can’t keep up with your grandkids or worry about your ability to travel and go sightseeing in a new city, it’s a clear sign that being out of shape is negatively impacting your quality of life. The good news is that improving your stamina and endurance is easy—it just requires commitment and dedication.

First, check in with your doctor

Before we go into detail on the best ways to increase your stamina, it’s important to note that you should check with your doctor before doing anything else. In most cases, decreased stamina is simply a sign that you’re out of shape. That said, it can also be a symptom of a more serious problem, especially if it seems to have started suddenly.

What are stamina and endurance?

While stamina and endurance are often used interchangeably, they aren’t exactly the same thing. Stamina refers to your mental and physical ability to participate in an activity for a long period, while endurance refers only to your body’s ability to exercise for a certain amount of time.

Your endurance depends on both your cardiovascular and muscular fitness. If you’re out of shape, you’re likely to have sore muscles, a racing heart, and feel out of breath when you’re more active than usual, although it’s also possible to experience either low cardiovascular endurance or low muscular endurance alone.

The benefits of increasing your stamina include reduced fatigue, improved physical and mental health, building your gym confidence, and less energy required to complete your everyday activities. It’s definitely a goal worth working on!

Improving stamina and endurance

If you want to improve your fitness level, the key is to follow the principle of progressive overload. In short, this means that if you never push yourself, you’ll never improve. You’ll need to regularly change up the frequency, intensity, distance, speed, volume, or weight of your workouts to improve your stamina and endurance.

Related to this is the SAID principle—Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands. SAID means your body will adapt to the types of exercises you perform. If, for example, you begin jogging for 30 minutes every day, your body will become accustomed to it. Your cardiovascular endurance will continue to improve, but your muscular endurance may begin to stagnate because you won’t be placing the same level of demand on it.

The bottom line? No matter what type of exercise you choose, increasing its intensity, frequency, or duration over time will improve your stamina and endurance.

Best exercises to improve stamina and endurance

The good news is that most exercises and workouts will improve your stamina and endurance. That said, here are a few that are particularly well-suited to increasing stamina, especially if you’re currently out of shape.

Interval training

Interval training consists of short bursts of high-intensity activity followed by longer periods of lower-intensity activity. This could mean alternating between running and jogging or dancing to a higher-energy song followed by one that’s a little bit slower.

Yoga

Choosing active recovery will help you keep working on your fitness goals, even on rest days. This means that instead of recovering through rest, you’ll recover from workouts with light activity. Yoga is a great workout for those activity recovery days because it will keep you moving without the risk of injury from overuse. Yoga reduces anxiety and stress, improving endurance and reducing fatigue.

Do cardio and strength training together

Many fitness experts recommend combining strength and cardio into a single workout to increase endurance. Incorporate short cardio bursts between weight sets. One of our personal trainers can help you come up with a routine that works for you.

Walking

Walking is an excellent activity to begin with when it comes to increasing your stamina. If you’re starting at a place where you feel winded walking up the stairs or get fatigued after walking relatively short distances, simply walking around your neighborhood for an extended amount of time—and continuously upping the duration of your walks—will go a long way towards improving your fitness.

Cycling

Whether it’s a stationary bike, road biking, or mountain biking, cycling can improve your stamina, all while letting you work at a pace that’s comfortable for you. Push yourself a little bit harder each time, and you’ll begin to see your stamina and endurance improve.

The bottom line

When you’re out of shape, it can feel daunting to increase your stamina. But getting started is the hardest part! Choose an activity you enjoy and continually push yourself a little harder each time. With consistency, you’ll quickly begin to see improvements in your stamina and endurance.