SRQ Health and Fitness Studio's 7 ways you can benefit from being healthier and more fit with regular strength training.
Why is strength training such an important aspect to your overall well-being? Besides the most commonly known benefits of adding definition and tone to your muscles, how else does strength training help? Well, here are just a few of the many ways.
1. Strength Training makes You More Fit and Much Stronger
With this first tip, the outcome to strength training is an obvious one. Muscle mass is a must in making it easier to do the things you need to do on a day-to-day basis, especially as we become older and begin to lose muscle.
Strength training is also known as resistance training and is achieved by contracting them against a resisting force, resulting in toning and strengthening your muscles.
There are two types of resistance training:
Isometric resistance training, which involves contracting your muscles against a nonmoving object, such as against the floor in a push-up.
Isotonic strength training, which involves contracting your muscles through a range of motion as in weight lifting.
2. Strength Training Protects Bone Health and Muscle Mass
At around age 30 we begin losing as much as 3 - 5% of muscle mass annually due to aging.
Studies show that just 30 minutes, twice a week, of high intensity resistance training and impact training has been shown to enhance functional performance, in addition to bone density, structure, and strength in postmenopausal women with low bone mass - with no known negative outcomes.
Muscle-strengthening activities help maintain and improve strength and muscle mass as we get older, which is essential for bone, joint, and muscle health.
3. Strength Training Helps Keep the Weight Off Once and for All
Aerobic exercise such as walking, jogging, and biking are well known ways to help increase the number of calories you burn off in a day and thereby helps to shed extra pounds. But strength training helps in these ways, too - even when you're not burning off a massive number of calories during the workout.
Exercise science researchers suspect that strength training is helpful for weight loss because it helps increase your resting metabolism - which is the rate at which your body burns off calories when you are just going about your day and not exercising.
Good resistance exercise training increases your surplus post-exercise oxygen consumption and keeps your metabolism active after exercising much longer than following an aerobic workout.
4. Strength Training Helps you Develop Better Body Mechanisms
Strength training benefits your balance, coordination, and posture. One study showed that in older people who are at higher risk of falling due to poor physical functioning, strength training decreased the dangers of falling from 40 percent compared with individuals who didn't do strength training exercises.
5. Strength Training Can Help with Chronic Disease Management
Studies have shown the numerous health benefits of strength training, for example, in helping with conditions that are managed by individuals with some chronic diseases. In cases of people with arthritis, strength training can be as effective as drugs in reducing arthritis pain.
And for the 14 million Americans using type 2 diabetes medications, strength training, along with medications offer healthier lifestyle changes that can help improve blood management.
6. Strength Training Boosts Energy Levels and Improves your Mood
Strength training increases your level of endorphins, the natural opiates made by the mind, which lifts energy levels and enhances your mood. With strength training, research that is considered includes neurochemical and neuromuscular responses to these workouts, and offers further evidence that it has a beneficial impact on the mind. What's more, there's even evidence that suggests that strength training may help you sleep better.
7. Strength Training has Cardiovascular Health Advantages
Together with aerobic exercise, muscle-building strength training physical activity helps improve blood pressure. Experts advocate that doing muscle-strengthening workouts twice per week, and 150 minutes a week of moderate-intensity training at the very least, will help to reduce hypertension and the risk of heart disease.