“Anaerobic Endurance” and its Assessment

Generally, endurance is understood as the ability to perform prolonged, continuous aerobic work. The presented concept of “anaerobic endurance” relates to intermittent, discontinuous work, consisting of anaerobic bouts of exercise. Anaerobic endurance is associated with the entire exercise task of the above mentioned nature. The consequence of this concept is, that laboratory or field tests based on single, maximal, anaerobic exercises, cannot serve as a measure of athlete’s performance in team sports. Two measures are proposed in order to assess an athlete’s performance task-wise: maximum performance (maximum value of given variable attained in intermittent task or a corresponding test) and task endurance (the capacity to perform well throughout the task). This requires designing exercise tests consisting of series of exercise bouts, resembling (in the number and spacing of bouts) competitive conditions. The following steps need to follow: selection of variables, determination of maximum performance and determination of task endurance. Maximum performance is the best result in the series, and task endurance, or performance index (PI), is the ratio of the mean performance to the maximum one. These two variables (max and PI) enable the assessment of subjects with respect to a given task since, as a rule, they are not correlated with one another.