Stamina vs Endurance: Do You Need to Train Them Differently?
You may have heard the terms “endurance” or “stamina” thrown around when talking about measures of general fitness or toughness, or how long you can ride. A Tour de France stage winner has great stamina on the Alpe d’Huez climb, and finishing the Tour de France requires epic amounts of endurance.
While endurance and stamina are often used interchangeably—and there are some similarities—in cycling, there are some important distinctions between the two. Also, more recently, the concept of “durability” has also entered the chat, becoming another valuable concept for a cyclist to consider.
Stamina is about going hard for a prolonged period of time, while endurance is simply about going long—often, really long. Both are difficult and require willpower and mental fortitude, as well as physical prowess.
“Someone with high endurance can just go for a long time,” says Ryan Kohler, a coach withRocky Mountain Devo. “Someone with a lot of stamina would typically have a great sprint, or be able to put out short bursts of high power during a race.”
On the bike, there’s a fair amount of overlap when looking at the lower end of the stamina spectrum compared to endurance. And durability seems to be the sweet spot where the two meet in a measurable way. Confused? You’re not alone. In cycling, these terms are all incredibly nuanced because there’s significant overlap between all three when used in the context of your ride.
What’s more: Unlike most cycling-specific metrics, each of these ways of assessing fitness are a bit less specific and numbers-driven than measures like functional threshold power or VO2 max.
To get a better understanding of endurance, stamina, and durability, here’s your guide to how each one relates to your cycling performance.
What is endurance and what are the benefits for cyclists?
In cycling, endurance is often used when talking about a specific power zone or heart rate zone or pace. Endurance pace is often considered conversational pace, or the rate at which you can pedal while still speaking in full sentences relatively comfortably. You may not be having an extremely casual chat with a friend (that would be your easy/recovery pace), but you can carry a reasonable conversation.
While endurance often refers to a pace to hold, more generally it refers to your ability to hold that pace for a long duration. To finish a ride like the 200-mile Unbound Gravel race requires you to have endurance, for example.
There’s not necessarily a single test that tells you that you have a high level of endurance. It’s just your ability to simply go long at a sustained power, says Tim Cusick of Basecamp Endurance Coaching.
How do you improve endurance?
If you want to build your endurance, add more volume to your training. That means spending more time in the saddle, specifically in zone 2.
Pay attention to your heart rate and power on these endurance rides, though, and avoid spending too much time above or below zone 2, because this is the zone in which you improve your endurance the most.
Also, add hours to your weekly training volume slowly, notes Kohler—don’t try to triple your hours on the bike this week in order to boost your endurance!
What is stamina and how does it benefit cyclists?
Stamina tends to refer to a cyclist’s ability to hold a higher effort for as long as possible, which is key to success on race day, where you’re not only riding for an extended period of time, but also doing it at a higher effort than your normal endurance pace. If you’ve ever done a time trial, a triathlon, a gravel race, or even a harder group ride than you’re used to, you’ve tapped into your stamina.
“Someone with high stamina can put out similar high power in hour three [of a ride] as they did in hour one,” says Kohler.
In cycling terms, stamina’s closest brethren would likely be your functional threshold power, though now apps like TrainingPeaks’ WKO—the platform that most coaches use to analyze power and heart rate data for cyclists—offer a slightly more nuanced look at it, and can give you an estimate of your stamina for rides of different durations.
In WKO, stamina is the measurement of the rate of decline of power in longer rides, explains Cusick. Essentially, it’s looking at how much you fade during rides of all different durations, from an hour to as long as 12 hours. Someone with high stamina will have a very slight rate of decline, meaning they’re able to hold a steady power for a prolonged period. A rider with low stamina might start a ride at a high power but quickly start to fade.
Finally, by definition and in contrast to endurance, stamina also typically refers to your mental drive. You need mental stamina to get through long, high-intensity efforts, too.
How do you improve stamina?
Add interval sessions to your weekly rides will help kick up your stamina. Mix up your intervals by doing longer efforts (like 10 to 15 minute threshold efforts) some days and shorter/faster efforts (like 30 sets of 30 second sprints with 30 seconds of rest in between) on others.
Avoid more than three interval workouts per week, though, as these efforts require plenty of rest if you want to see results.
Why should you pay attention to durability in cycling, too?
The newest hot metric to measure in cycling is durability, says Kohler. Durability is both its own metric and a great lens to use when trying to assess endurance and stamina.
“Durability is more measurable because it’s looking at your heart rate and your power data, and seeing at what point they become decoupled,” he explains.
Confused? If you’ve ever been doing a workout that required you to ride in zone 4, but then as you hit the third interval, you realized your heart rate was kicking into zone 5 while your power was still firmly in zone 4, you’ve experienced decoupling. Basically, it’s what happens when your power and heart rate zones are no longer matching up on your ride—a very common occurrence, especially for newer riders.
While there are outside factors like temperature, hydration levels, fueling and even how you slept the night before or if you were sick last week that can make your heart rate zones more likely to decouple from your power zones, Kohler says that durability refers to a more long-term trajectory.
“I look at the power and heart rate relationship over the course of the season,” he says. “Often, early in the season, we might see that after an hour of riding, your heart rate and power start to decouple because you’ve only been doing shorter, harder efforts on the trainer for the last few months. But after a few weeks of doing longer rides, you’ll see that your heart rate and power stay coupled together longer as you develop durability again.”
Kohler notes that you may have different zones where you’re more or less durable, which is why it can be a good way to assess your stamina and your endurance. Some riders, like the one riding a 200-miler at Unbound, will have their heart rate and power stay coupled for hours on end in zone 2, but if they move into zone 4, their heart rate and power decouples after a few minutes. A crit racer may find that their power and heart rate are neatly coupled during a set of on-and-off efforts (like you’d see in a crit race), but on a three-hour ride, their ability to keep heart rate coupled to power in zone 2 flounders after 90 minutes.
Don’t panic if you’re seeing a small degree of decoupling in your heart rate and power, though; Kohler says that being five percent over or under isn’t necessarily a sign of decoupling.
How do you improve durability?
Set up your cycling computer screen to display your power and your heart rate, and know your zones for each. As you ride, pay attention to if your heart rate starts to drift up or down in the zone you’re supposed to be in. If you notice that it’s going up, lower your power slightly (to the lower end of the zone) to try to bring it back down.
For example, if riding in zone 3 means you should be between 150 to 160 bpm and 150 to 170 watts and your heart rate is hitting 160 while your power is at 165, try lowering your power to 150 to see if your heart rate will drop while still staying in zone 3 for your power. These small adjustments will help keep your power/heart rate zones coupled and will improve your durability over time.
Should you focus on improving stamina or endurance—or durability?
It depends on your goals. If you’re a gravel grinder or bikepacker, focusing on building that endurance base—the ability to go at a steady pace for a long time—is going to be the best spot to focus.
If you’re a racer of any kind, stamina is a good place to focus, but target your stamina goals to reflect your style of racing. On-and-off-the-gas style races like crits or cyclocross lend themselves to having high stamina at shorter/harder efforts, while a time trial will be more threshold-focused in terms of the stamina required.
Finally, durability is a good way to measure your level of stamina and endurance: Use an app like TrainingPeaks to see your power and heart rate zones together to assess where they tend to decouple. That data can help you spot your weak points and your strong points on the power curve.
For example, you may notice that during long endurance rides, you can go for hours at a time without your heart rate starting to spike out of zone 2, which means endurance is your strong point. But as soon as you start adding in threshold intervals, you struggle to keep your heart rate low enough to match your power in that same zone, and it spikes after five minutes. This doesn’t mean you’re doomed to have a low threshold forever: It just means you need to do some focused threshold training!
As with any metric, your stamina, endurance, and durability all will change over time, with training, with age, and with the season of life that you’re in. Some people are naturally more endurance-oriented, while others have more high-end stamina. But every cyclist can improve all of these metrics with concerted effort and practice.
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