4 Sports That Build Strength, Endurance, and Fitness

Playing a competitive sport can add the sort of  significance to your workouts that can result in you training longer and harder than you otherwise would, and motivate you to produce athletic output that’s going to be publicly displayed and measured.

Not every sport is able to reshape your body in a beneficial way simply through the daily training you commit to it. This is especially true in adulthood, where the time and energy you’re able to devote to your sport may be reduced to one hour or less each day, and your time for supplemental training is limited. 

With this in mind, here are four of the best sports hobbies that can provide you with the added incentive to boost your all-purpose fitness.

1. Swimming

For the development of functional, total-body strength, conditioning, and flexibility, it’s very difficult to beat swimming. The enhanced density of the water means that your limbs are always working against resistance no matter what direction they’re moving in. Ultimately, your hard work will pay off in the form of a body that has been rebuilt by the aquatic environment to contend with a dense atmosphere.

In essence, if you get in the water on a daily basis and truly commit yourself, your strength, endurance, flexibility, lung capacity, and respiratory control are going to go through the roof while you burn hundreds of calories per day.

All of this is a prelude to the competitive element; there are hundreds of organized masters swimming organizations throughout North America. These groups represent tens of thousands of members, many of whom compete on the state, provincial, regional, and national levels in championship meets that are held in world-class facilities.

So, if you decide to swim competitively in adulthood, you can get in the best shape of your life while preparing yourself to compete in settings that are far more sophisticated than local bowling alleys or old high school gymnasiums.

2. Running

While access to most fitness facilities usually comes with a price attached, public streets and sidewalks are training surfaces that you can traverse free of charge. Because of this, running — probably the first means of travel you adopted after crawling and walking — becomes a method of training that is very inexpensive to begin, and you get to dictate the distance you cover, and the speed at which you cover that distance.

Certainly, you can choose to run solely for the sake of fitness, but since there are usually around 30,000 organized road races in the U.S. each year, with distances ranging from five kilometers to 100 miles or more, you can probably find a level of competitive challenge that matches your present level of conditioning, and can accommodate your skill level as it improves.

Moreover, with so many training guides readily available to help you condition your body for whatever running distance you’ve got in mind, you can join a local running club for extra motivation, and set yourself on a trajectory that can lead to you one day qualifying for the Boston Marathon, or one of the other major marathons that are highly prized among runners. 

Needless to say, by that point your body will have been thoroughly reshaped for the rigors of the road, and aerobically elite according to anyone’s assessment.

3. CrossFit

If you’re trying to become fit, there simply aren’t many better places that you can go than a gym where they practice “the sport of fitness.” 

A well-structured CrossFit program can radically transform your body along several fronts, building your strength, power, conditioning, endurance, and aerobic capacity through a wide array of movements and training methods. 

The key word is “well-structured”; a CrossFit program should take into account the training you completed on prior days to allow for adequate recovery to the affected muscle groups. In practice, this should prevent you from going all-out on a rower while depending on hips and quads that you just finished frying with three dozen power cleans and 100 box jumps the night before. 

Now, assuming that your workouts are taking this into account, a CrossFit gym — usually known as a “box” — can be a phenomenal place to build all of the attributes that are commonly associated with fitness, while granting you the muscles to go with it. 

Furthermore, the fact that there are well over 1,000 CrossFit competitions held every year that will assure that you’re sorted into the right class of competitors, there is always going to be a place where you and your box-mates can show off just how spectacularly your fitness level has improved.

4. Indoor Rowing

Perhaps the most underrated sporting event on this list, indoor rowing is included because of the ways that rowing machines have been adapted to accommodate the competitive energies of people without a convenient body of water nearby.

In particular, Concept2 Rowers (or rowergs) include hardware that permits results to be easily uploaded to the Concept2 website. Yes, this functions as an easy way to store and track workout data, but it also allows you to rank your best rows nationally and internationally, or at a state or city level.

Because of this feature, and because there are defined seasons for reporting your best performances in each event, you can informally compete to be the champion of whatever state or region you find yourself occupying, or you can officially enter several organized challenges.

Of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge the major benefits of rowing — an activity that involves roughly 84 percent of the muscles in your body. From a total body improvement standpoint, there are few exercises that incorporate your entire body and allow you to go all-out in the same way as rowing. This is without even including the fact that rowing, unlike swimming, allows you to remain dry… at least before the sweating starts.

Seek the sweat-inducing sports

If you thrive on competitive energy, then channeling that energy through the proper sport can be all it takes to send you on a trajectory toward a better life. Not only will you have new accomplishments to brag about, along with the potential for athletic glory spurring you to even greater successes, but you’ll do it while inhabiting a body capable of achieving great things in everything else you endeavor to try. 

Summary

1. The basic training for certain sports can completely reshape your body and launch you toward the top percentiles of adult athletes in terms of your overall fitness. 

2. Swimming challenges your body to work in an aquatic environment, and improves everything from your strength and flexibility to your lung capacity.

3. Running is the sport that offers the easiest access to training surfaces, and provides you with plenty of opportunities to compete in organized racing events.

4. CrossFit can offer immersive exposure to a number of strength- and power-boosting exercises in a demanding format that ultimately builds aerobic as well.

5. Indoor rowing can offer you a unique opportunity to track your training progress and easily enter competitive challenges, all of which can help you challenge your muscles and burn calories.

6. By doing nothing other than training for these sports, you are likely to become impressively fit in adulthood.