No matter what your age, goal, or gender, strength training is important. Improving your strength requires you to do exercises that require pulling or pushing against a resistance. Doing bodyweight exercises, using gravity, and the weight of the body and resistance bands are two ways, but you can also lift weights. Lifting weights is beneficial for everyone, including older individuals and women. Most women worry that they’ll build big, bulky muscles, but it’s almost impossible to do. Instead, they’ll get svelte, lean muscle mass.
Lifting weights helps you lose weight.
All types of exercise increase the number of calories you burn, but strength training, like weightlifting, helps build muscle tissue, too. The calories burned when you do strength training come from fat, while endurance exercises, like running, use calories from both lean muscle mass and fat. The more lean muscle mass you have, the higher your metabolism and the easier it is to lose weight.
Weight-bearing exercises like lifting weights increase bone strength.
As your muscles get weaker, so do your bones. The entire body works as one. What affects the muscles, affects the bones. Moving strong muscles causes them to tug on the bones. Through a group of processes, it triggers a message for them to uptake more calcium to make them stronger. If you don’t do some type of weight-bearing exercise, your bones lose calcium, which makes them thinner and causes osteoporosis.
Working out with weights can help prevent and even reverse insulin resistance and diabetes.
Weight training can help reduce the potential for insulin resistance, a precursor to diabetes. It can help level out blood sugar levels, as well. Weight training activates four signaling pathways that increase APPL1 production. APPL1 is a protein that helps the body use insulin properly and aids in regulating how glucose is absorbed. Those changes allow the muscles to use glucose more effectively.
- Lifting weight can help reduce the pain of arthritis. It can strengthen the muscles and tendons around the joints to help lift the pressure. Studies show it can increase function in the arthritic areas.
- Lifting weights can also help lower blood pressure and reduce markers of stress. It increases the nitric oxide in the blood that relaxes the vessels, burns off stress hormones, and increases hormones that make you feel good.
- Women benefit from weight training because it helps reset hormones. It can limit menstrual pain and diminish PMS. It’s especially good for women entering menopause and can ease symptoms, while building bones and keeping weight off.
- There are many ways lifting weights can help improve your health, including boosting your energy level. However, you should always check with your healthcare professional first before starting any exercise program.
For more information, contact us today at UpFit Training Academy
