Strength Training

What is strength training? It is a key component of overall health, fitness, and wellness.

Strength training (weight training) exercises the muscles by contracting them against a form of resistance. Resistance can be working against your body weight or using free weights (dumbbells, barbells, kettlebells, weight machines, medicine balls, and resistance bands).

Strength training helps prevent injury and improve muscular/skeletal, cardiovascular, digestive, and brain health outcomes.

If you want to engineer better health and keep your independence as you age, let’s get started on your strength training.

Benefits of Strength Training:

• Helps to maintain muscle strength and function and improve general physical function

• Increases muscle mass, making muscle fibres stronger and denser and allowing their natural shape to become visible

• Can aid fat loss as it takes more thermic energy of the body to move muscle rather than fat (and is superior to cardio exercise for overall fat loss)

• Helps to control blood sugar (by lowering insulin and reducing insulin resistance)

• Improves sleep

• Improves bone density, reducing the risk of fractures

• Strong muscles improve the flexibility of joints and reduce the symptoms of arthritis and stiffness

• Reduces all-cause mortality from the four major disease clusters leading to non-accidental death: cardiac or respiratory disease, cancer, auto-immune, and neuro-degenerative diseases

• Improves posture and balance through a more robust Musco-skeletal frame and core stability

Frequency:

Strength training should be optimally performed a minimum of twice weekly for 30 minutes each time.

With consistency, strength training can be carried out 4-5 times weekly for up to 75 minutes at a time, allowing the body rest and recovery of 24 hours or more.