What is strength training?
Strength training, also known as weight or resistance training, is physical activity designed to improve muscular strength and fitness by exercising a specific muscle or muscle group against external resistance, including free-weights, weight machines, or your own body weight. Strength training is a key component of overall health and fitness for everyone. In addition to its versatility and convenience, strength training is an efficient and effective workout that provides a variety of physical and mental health benefits.
Here are some uncommon benefits of strength training:
Makes you stronger: Strength training helps increase the general strength of the body. This in turn results in more ease while performing day to day activities which includes things like lifting heavy objects or playing with kids and pets. Strength training is also called resistance training because it involves strengthening and toning your muscles by contracting them against a resisting force.
Decreases abdominal fat: In a 2014 study published in the research journal Obesity, Harvard researchers followed 10,500 men over the course of 12 years and found that strength training is more effective at preventing increases in abdominal fat than cardiovascular exercise.
When people incorporate strength training into their exercise routine, they not only burn calories, but increase lean muscle mass, which stimulates the metabolism. Muscle mass is a major factor in determining basal metabolic rate, or the number of calories the body burns per day to sustain physiologic functions.
Lowers risk of injury: It’s time to rethink your stretching routine. By taking your joints through their full range of motion during strength exercises, you can increase that range of motion over time. Results from a 2017 study in the journal ‘Isokinetics and Exercise Science’ show that strength training improves flexibility in both men and women.
A previous 2006 North American Journal of Sports Physical Therapy study suggests that eccentric strength exercises may provide the biggest benefit, improving hamstring flexibility twice as well as static stretching. Eccentric exercises are any that emphasize muscle lengthening, rather than shortening. Example exercises might include the lowering phase of a squat or raising the bar during a lat pull-down.
Improves heart health: Abdominal fat is located in and around the vital organs. It is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD). Visceral fat is linked to CVD because it’s associated with the release of certain proteins and hormones that cause inflammation. This inflammation has been shown to damage blood vessels, increase blood pressure and lead to other cardiac problems. So, preventing or reducing any excess abdominal fat through strength training can certainly improve heart health.
For example, 2013 research in the Journal of Applied Physiology demonstrates that young men who regularly strength train have better-functioning HDL, or good cholesterol, compared with those who never pump iron. Rebold explains that strength training improves blood pressure and triglyceride levels similarly to cardiovascular exercise, but it has even greater benefits on HDL.
Help manage blood sugar levels: Anyone with Type 2 diabetes should incorporate resistance training into their routine. That’s because as a 2013 review published in the journal BioMed Research International showed, in addition to building muscle, strength training also improves the muscle’s ability to take in and use glucose, or blood sugar.
In your muscle cells, you have these transporters that pick up glucose from the blood and deliver it to the muscle cells. This improves their functioning to pick up a lot more glucose from the blood and into muscle, thereby decreasing blood sugar levels.
Ms Kalinga