how to improve my endurance?

[PrairieDawg]

hey guys I'm not in track and field or anything like that but I need to improve my endurance and I figured you guys would know all about that. I'm going to be taking a firefighter test, which is basically all endurance from what I hear. The problem is I have very little of that since I havent been involved in sports for a couple years now and all I've been doing is trying to put on weight. I'm hitting a cycle in a few months and I think I'm going to work on the endurance part a couple months after that. any advice would be helpful.

[EastCoaster]

hey guys I'm not in track and field or anything like that but I need to improve my endurance and I figured you guys would know all about that. I'm going to be taking a firefighter test, which is basically all endurance from what I hear. The problem is I have very little of that since I havent been involved in sports for a couple years now and all I've been doing is trying to put on weight. I'm hitting a cycle in a few months and I think I'm going to work on the endurance part a couple months after that. any advice would be helpful.

Endurance is something that has to be built up progressively. I'm not sure exactly what kind of shape you're in but I will take a guess that you are in decent physical shape.

Try this work out on a track

Start out by lightly jogging 2 laps as a warm up then stretch.

Start out by jogging 1 mile, if you feel like you can do more.... do it. Try to increase the pace each day and more so, with each week.


Good Luck

[Warrior]

We used to do wind sprints and timed laps to help fight off fatigue...

Wind Sprints were basically doing sprints with light jog intervals. Sprint, jog, sprint, jog... divide a track into quarters and sprint for one quarter and then jog the other 3/4... this helps to keep you pushing out more energy - even when your tired... like at the end of a race.

We would also do timed distances. We were training for a better 3 mile run time so we would keep doing 1 mile runs for time. The goal would be to do each mile in the same amount of time. If you do your first mile in 6:30 - every mile after that should be 6:30... then the next goal would be to do each mile in 6:20. This helps to keep up your endurance by staying at a consistent speed.

[PrairieDawg]

yeah I know its a gradual kind of thing but I'm going to have to improve it somewhat just to finish the dam test and not pass out, lol.
the only thing I'm worried about is loosing some of my gains from my cycle by doing so much hard cardio. what are do's and don'ts with nutrition? should I do the cardio with at least some food in my stomache so that it my body isnt eating away at my muscles?