It is a shame that more people do not include strength training exercise into their fitness regime as it can have remarkable health benefits. For starters the body’s moving parts – your muscles and joints along with the bones that they are attached to become stronger with proper exercise and give each other better support. This of course gives greater protection from injury and gives the human body a firmer, tighter more toned appearance.
Strength training exercise is also the number one best weight loss tool on the planet. If a person has become overweight they often believe they have a body fat problem. In fact, they have an ‘under muscled’ problem. Without enough muscle building and maintaining activity the body’s metabolism – its fat burning machinery slows to a crawl.
This means less fuel (calories) are burnt for energy and more are stored as fat weight. Most people think that a diet of some sort if going to solve the problem but no amount of reduced calorie diets will fix the underlying reason why one has become overweight when the metabolism is the root cause. There is only one way to fix this.
Yes, you guessed it a proper strength training program to rebuild and restore precious muscle tissue that has been allowed to wither away with disuse. Do not be misled into believing that any type of movement or exercise will restore muscle tissue as it will not. Low intensity endurance types of activity will not change body composition (muscle/fat ratio) and that is what must happen to correct the issue of becoming overweight.
Body composition is the best measure of the effectiveness of your exercise program. It can be done at your local gym or fitness center and will tell you how much body fat you have in relation to how much muscle tissue you have. Obviously you want less fat and more muscle as the key to good health is so much more than battling the bathroom scale.
You need good quality toned muscle tissue if you want good health and you also need good quality toned muscle if you want to lose weight for the long term. Weak flabby muscles will never give you a healthy body weight as you would have to eat food that would fit through the eye of a needle and that is not eating in a healthy manner.
So, if you have some weight to lose think about re-stoking your metabolic furnace rather than blaming your slowed metabolism. “I am gaining weight because my metabolism has slowed down so it’s not my fault”. But people do not gain weight because their metabolisms are slowing down, their metabolism are slowing down because their muscle tissue is being lost.
For every pound of muscle you lose, you lose a slice of your metabolism burning less fuel and storing more as fat weight. Just reverse the situation and watch the reverse happen. Build your muscle tissue back and watch your health improve in every way which includes losing that excess body fat.
Do not get caught in the old belief that you are getting enough daily physical activity to be healthy. Maybe 30-50 years ago this might have been true, but not in this modern sedentary world where most of us sit for 80 percent of our day in one chair or another.
When challenged by proper exercise, such as strength training your muscles, bones, cells and tissues are continually forced to renew themselves. This is the closest thing we have to the Fountain of Youth. Nothing else even comes close to being able to sweep out old, degenerated cells and rebuilding younger, stronger and healthier new tissue to keep you looking and feeling a million dollars no matter your age.
