Did you know that regularly doing a weight training program offers some important benefits for your health than doing cardio exercises simply can’t? It’s true! Building a strong body is essential to weight loss, avoiding weight gain, and maintaining a healthy body as you age.
Routinely I see people at the gym that get started on a new fitness routine. The first thing they do is hop on the cardio equipment. Maybe they head for the treadmill, or the stair climber, but it’s always on what they concentrate. A year goes by and I see that same person. And guess what? Their body doesn’t look any different, or they may even end up injured from overuse!
How can this be? Because they don’t do any weight training. Most people who try to use exercise to get healthy or boost their weight loss simply don’t realize the important role that weight training plays. There are some benefits that strength training programs offer that cardio programs simply can’t provide.
If you want to see a noticeable difference in your body and get healthy, you really need to add a strength training regimen to your weekly workouts. While doing cardio exercises puts you doing the same thousands of reps, you are actually putting stress on your already over-stressed joints. Weight lifting, on the other hand, will put less stress on your joints, yet it will give you comparable or better benefits.
Some of the benefits of keeping up with a strength training program include:
Building lean muscle tissue
Helping with stability and balance
Helping to prevent over-use injuries
Preventing a variety of disease, including arthritis, diabetes, obesity, depression, osteoporosis, and back pain
If you have access to a gym, you can easily do your strength training program there. But if you don’t, you can still do some weight training right at home. Look around your home and grab some common items that can be used as weights, such as cans out of your pantry, filled buckets from the garage, or gallon jugs of water. What you are lifting is not nearly as important as the fact that you are doing some strength training.
So just how often do you need to do strength training to be healthy? Just including it into your fitness routine twice per week will go a long way toward ensuring that you have a healthy body. Whether you are just starting a routine, or you have been doing one for years, now is the time to add in some strength training to ensure your fitness success!
