Okay, aside from what we talked about last week: fat loss, muscle tone, and burning more calories with strength training. What are the other benefits of strength training?
As we age, along with decreasing hormones comes changes or decrease in muscle known as sarcopenia. Sarcopenia causes an increase in fat storage, which increases your chances of high blood pressure, bad cholesterol, diabetes, and a whole host of other cardiovascular and metabolic disorders. Having less fat lessons the chance of heart disease, diabetes and certain cancers. One thing leads to another like a domino effect.
In older folks, many times these things are caused by inactivity. Strength training can help prolong or even reverse the aging process that leads to these conditions. Think of it as a fountain of youth. So, how does strength training help with this? Strength training helps by increasing bone density. Often times you hear about older adults falling and breaking a leg or hip, for example. Remember the “help I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” scene”? Well, had that person been strength training they would have less of a chance of falling. If they did fall, they would have a much lower chance of breaking a bone due to strength training and its ability to increase bone density and help prevent osteoporosis.
In addition to strengthening tendon and muscle, strength training has been shown in studies to be more effective at reducing belly fat than cardio. This will help you to get those six pack abs that everyone wants.
Squatting and deadlifting heavy weights has also been shown to help increase growth hormone and testosterone. What are the benefits of these two you might ask? Here are just a few:
- Increases muscle strength, fat loss, exercise tolerance, and endurance
- Improves skin texture, thickness, and elasticity as well as wrinkle disappearance improvement
- Increases new hair growth
- Healing of old injuries and improved healing capacity
- Improves back flexibility
- Builds resistance to common illnesses
- Improves sexual potency and frequency
- Improves frequency of nighttime urination
- Improvements on hot flashes
- Improves menstrual cycle regulation
- Increases in energy levels
- Improves emotional stability
- Improves attitude towards life
- Improves memory and concentration
- Improves sleep and helps you feel more rested
- Improves insulin sensitivity
- Boosts motivation
- Improves mood and overall sense of sense of well-being
Yo! Do I have your attention? Basically, if you’re not doing strength training you’re missing out on a lot of benefits. This stuff is life-changing folks. If you keep following my blogs, take notes, and pay attention. I’m going to show you how it can all be yours and you can be a winner in this jackpot!
There are so many benefits to strength training and these aren’t even all of them – just the few that I can think of off the top of my head. The only side effect is that when you first start out the weight is very heavy and you do get very sore. However, as I mentioned before, after a little while of training consistently, your exercise tolerance increases and you reap all of those benefits.
So what are you waiting for? Get to the weight room now!
Please join me next week where I’ll be discussing the two most important elements of training.
Thanks,
Donovan
