What is exactly stamina? What happens when it gets trained? Do your lungs get better and more efficient at pumping air?
In: Biology
Muscles use oxygen to work. Your blood carries oxygen to your muscles. Breathing air puts more oxygen in your blood. Blood moves in your body through special kinds of pipes (arteries and veins). Your heart is the pump that makes blood move. When you start to exercise your body, the pipes become bigger, and your body creates more smaller kinds of pipes (capillaries). These are near your muscles to directly give them oxygen. When these pipes become bigger your heart needs to pump less to move the same amount of blood. Your heart becomes more efficient because of the better piping, your muscles receive oxygen more easily, and your stamina improves.
People are mistaken when they say they exercise to improve cardio (heart). They are improving the entire machine of blood and oxygen movement (cardiovascular system). As an example if you biked to improve your “cardio” (heart) it won’t necessarily improve your “cardio” (heart) for a different part of your body. For instance your improved biking “cardio” wouldn’t help you much if you had to use your arms to bike instead. This is because the leg piping system that was improved from biking didn’t improve your arm piping. It wasn’t your heart that improved your conditioning it was your piping (vascular).
What is even more interesting, the exercises benefits can be largely very specific. Tests have been done with people exercising “cardio” by biking with one leg. Their one leg stamina improved as expected. But there was no improvement when they needed to use the other leg. Their heart pumped efficiently with the exercised leg, but the heart was less efficient with the unexercised leg.
There is some transfer of stamina from one exercise to another. Running tends to improve a person’s stamina in other activities better than with biking or swimming, all common “cardio” exercises.
Most of this information is in the NSCA fundamentals of personal training handbook.
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