How Do I Improve Stamina It’s Important to Get a Good Balance

Increasing stamina is about increasing your cardiovascular endurance, and this can be achieved by gently increasing three things: the length of time you exercise, the intensity of your exercise, and the frequency with which you exercise. Essentially this means to run for longer, run faster and run more often. It’s important to get a good balance, however – you want to push yourself hard enough to increase stamina, but not so hard that you feel defeated or cause an injury.

Run for longer. Whatever your fitness level, the first thing to do is slowly increase your running time and decrease your walking time. If you’ve started with two minutes running and two minutes walking, try three minutes running and two minutes walking the next week. Then try jumping to 5 minutes running, with three minutes walking. Keep building up until you can run the full 20 minutes with no walking.

Once you’ve got to your 20 minutes of solid running, increase to 25, then 30. If you’re interested in long-distance running, you can keep increasing your time each week. However, you may also benefit from pushing yourself to run a bit faster and focusing on distance.

Run faster. Once you’re at 30 minutes, aim to cover a larger distance in that time by increasing your speed. Alternatively, you can now switch to measuring distance rather than time

Run more often. When you first start running, aiming to run 3 days a week is a good benchmark to improve stamina. As you get fitter, try squeezing in an extra day here and thereafter a few weeks you may find that you can happily run every day.