A fitness plan is essential for individual health. Proper nutrition and exercise make you look better and feel better. They can also improve your mood and lengthen your life. Cardiovascular training is important to burn calories and keep your heart healthy, but don’t overlook the importance of strength training!
If you’re not a bodybuilder, weightlifter, or manual worker, you might not consider how important strength is to you. But every lifestyle and everybody is helped by strength training. Every movement you make is powered by your muscles. Simple tasks like carrying groceries, taking an item down from a shelf, and getting up after a fall all require physical strength – and without the right kind of exercise, even such everyday tasks become more difficult with age.
Strength training keeps your body fit, flexible, and functional throughout your life. In order to move easily and comfortably, you need strength in the muscles of your core as well as your limbs. A body that regularly moves against resistance is more capable in all sorts of movements. Strength training produces improvements in flexibility and balance, allowing you to move more effectively and comfortably. It also aids energy and stamina. These improvements help self-confidence and keep us mobile.
Yet muscles are not the only part of the body aided by strength training. Strong muscles build strong bones. The stress of pulling, pushing, and lifting stimulates your muscles to grow stronger. Your bones, the anchors of the muscles, show the same effect. Research shows that even moderate amounts of strength training keep bones strong and healthy, helping to ward off such conditions as osteoporosis. People who do regular strength training are less likely to have bone fractures, particularly at such vulnerable sites as the spine, hips, and wrists. Breaks in these areas are increasingly likely as we age, so strength training is highly important to protect our health.
When we think of maintaining a healthy body weight, nutrition, and aerobic exercise spring to mind more readily than strength training – yet here, too, strength training plays a vital role. Not only does it burn calories during a workout, but the stressed muscles continue to burn calories afterward as they repair themselves and return to a resting state. Furthermore, muscle tissue burns calories passively. People with more muscle mass burn more calories – even in their sleep.
Strength training releases endorphins – “feel-good” hormones that improve mood and self-confidence. This often creates a feeling of euphoria during or just after a workout. But it also has been shown to improve mood in the long term. Regular strength training has been shown to ameliorate the effects of depression, chronic pain, and other long-term issues. It creates a health improvement that you can feel for yourself.
Despite the numerous and well-proven benefits of strength training, many people feel confused and overwhelmed with how to begin. In fact, it’s easy to begin a simple isometric program at home, using such familiar exercises as push-ups, sit-ups, planks, deep knee bends, and jumping jacks. However, to develop and keep a valuable lifetime habit of exercise, it certainly is useful to have professional help! These days, gyms are more approachable and affordable than ever. Fitness clubs such as Fitness 19 offer friendly, convenient, and inexpensive ways to develop a great fitness habit with benefits for your whole life.