The Benefits of Strength Training

Let’s face it, most people do not exercise for the sole reason of preventing illness such as heart disease or deteriorating bones; if you ask most people they would say that they exercise because it makes you look and feel good – and that is exactly what a truly successful exercise program will do if you include all the right ingredients, namely diet, stretching, aerobic and anaerobic exercises.

To achieve the maximum benefits a person needs to incorporate all four into their lifestyle. This page is dedicated to anaerobic exercise, or in other words, strength training exercises. There are many benefits of strength training, but the most obvious is that it does just what it says it does – it develops strength. Weight training is by far the best way to develop muscle size. No other training activity can provide the large arms, chest abdominal muscles and powerful legs that weight training can; however, other benefits include a more attractive and trim body, power, improved sports performance, enhanced self-image, weight loss, and a great outlet for stress and pent-up emotions. Most people will see rapid gains within only a few short weeks.

Health Benefits

Some of the health-related benefits specifically attributed to weight training are: 1) prevention in osteoporosis, because weight training specifically improves the density of your bones. 2) More regulated blood pressure, simply because the more strong you are the less your blood pressure will increase. Stronger muscles don’t have to work as hard to exert the same force, so they constrict blood vessels less. 3) A decrease in back pain. Studies have shown that people who are stronger than average are much less susceptible to back pain.

Weight Training

There are two basic types of weight training: isometric exercise and isotonic exercise. Isometric exercises are a static exercise, or there is no movement in the range of motion for the muscle, there is force being applied but no movement. Examples of this kind of exercise are things like pushing against a wall or pushing the palms of your hands together. Isometric exercises are not very popular today and too much training in this can lead to injury. A valuable isometric exercise, however, is simply tightening and releasing the abominable muscles, which is a good way to tone and strengthen them. Isotonic exercises is just the opposite, applying force with movement in the muscles range of motion. Examples of this more popular form of exercise includes weight machines, free weights such as dumbbells or even using the bodies own weight such as doing push-ups or pull-ups.

Know Your Purpose

Not all exercising is the same nor will it give you the same results. In a nutshell, muscle mass is made up of three different types of muscle fibers: type A, type 2-B and type C. Type A muscles are the “power” muscles, they give you bursts of speed and enable you to do things like jump and blast off in a dead run. Type 2-B muscles are the endurance muscles; they keep on going and going, they enable you to run marathons. The type C muscles are recruited to meet the need at hand; these muscles can change to be either type A or type 2-B depending on how you train. You may ask why this is important to know or understand, it is because if your goal is to increase strength and muscle size then you will want to do the kind of exercise that train and build type A muscle fiber, not type 2-B. For example, compare a sprinter with a marathon runner in a race; the sprinter, who looks very powerful with strong well defined muscles, bursts out of the blocks and down the track with lightening speed leaving the marathon runner in the dust; however, a short distance later the marathon runner will confidently pass him by leaving the sprinter to eat the marathon runner’s dust for miles and miles to come. The difference? The sprinter has a lot of type A muscle fiber developed and very little type 2-B and conversely with the marathon runner. Think of the muscles of these two runners as the kind of breast meat you would find on a duck and on a chicken: the duck has dark breast meat, type A muscle fiber, which allows it the power of lifting off out of a pond with a sudden burst of power. The chicken, on the other hand, has white breast meat, because it is not doing anything requiring great bursts of power with its wings. The darker the meat the more "power" in the muscle 

The more you exercise the more muscle fiber you will develop and need, that is why you have type C muscle fiber. As you continually train a certain kind of muscle, the other muscle fibers will lie undeveloped per se and the type C muscles will be recruited to take on the characteristics of the muscle group you are training – whether that is for power or for endurance. So, you don’t want to be running long distances if you are training for speed and power, and you do not want to be doing a lot of sprint training if you are training for endurance. Another example of this is exercises using lots of repetitions with lighter weights will give you a sleek, toned body, where fewer repetitions with increased weight will give you power – a bigger stronger body.  Match the exercise and training with the end goal in mind.

Getting Started

Beginners should start off with more repetitions and lighter weights to give tissues a chance to adjust to increased muscular activity. This will also help minimize injury. Take increases gradually. One nice thing to remember is that the benefit of exercising is cumulative meaning that you do not need to do everything all at once in order for it to pay off in the end. For example, a beginner may want to do 10 pushups in the morning before going to work, 10 pushups in the afternoon around lunch time or a break, and then 10 pushups in the evening before going to bed. You will notice a real difference after only two days; you will notice that you won’t be a shaky doing the pushups as you were just two days ago and you will be able to do them much easier. After a week of this you will feel very confident, even excited in doing more. Increase the number of pushups to 15 for each session and then each week thereafter increasing by 5 pushups. After 4 short weeks you will find yourself doing up to 100 pushups a day. Think about that, how many people do you know that do 100 pushups every day?

The following guide is a good way to begin without having to invest in a club membership of buying expensive equipment to fill your home. You will increase your strength, loose weight, feel better, look better, shed inches and improve your whole outlook on life in as little as just eight weeks by sticking to it. Although this guide will help get you started, using weights or a machine will give you much better results in the long run. Begin with a goal of exercising about three days a week in mind.

Warm-Up

Additional Resources:

Basic Weight Training for Men and Women by Thomas D. Fahey

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