Here’s what you need to know….
- Weight training increases both muscular size and strength which will have a profound effect on not only your appearance but also on markers of physical health as well.
- Increasing an athlete’s strength is one of the quickest and easiest ways to improve their performance, even endurance athlete’s such as runners, swimmers and cyclists.
- Regular strength training can reduce the risk of injury by increasing the strength of the muscle’s, bones, ligaments and tendons making them more resistant to strains and tears.
Weight Training is the most effective way to increase muscle mass, improve physical performance and reduce the risk of injury – whether you are a man or woman, young or old. For all of those reasons, weight lifting should form the cornerstone of your training program. The trouble is, the only benefit most people associate with weight training is an increase in muscle mass. Unfortunately, this leads them to believe that weight training is only for young, narcissistic body building types that make gyms unpleasant and intimidating places. This couldn’t be further from the truth – weight training is for everyone and the benefits of weight training extend to all groups of people in all different ways. To give you an idea of some of the benefits you can experience through weight training here is a list of the most common;
1. Increased Muscle Mass
As I’ve already mentioned, the most obvious benefit that can be derived from lifting weights is, of course, an increase in lean muscle mass. For a lot of guys, this is the primary reason for working out and given that a sizeable proportion of society considers a well proportioned muscular physique ‘aesthetically pleasing’, it’s to understand why. Shallow as that might be, it’s hard to refute that you’re going to look better with bigger, fuller muscles. But looking good isn’t the only upshot of increasing your overall muscle mass, there are considerable health benefits to be gained from it too. Most notably, increasing your bodies levels of lean muscle mass will raise what’s known as Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR). RMR simply refers to the amount of calories we burn at rest and contributes to our overall daily calorie expenditure. This can make it easier to lose weight and more importantly, keep that weight off in the long run. In doing so, this will reduce your risk of contracting modern diseases such as diabetes, high blood pressure and coronary heart disease considerably.
2. Improved Performance
These days, most professional sports teams will have a specialist strength & conditioning coach and facility at their disposal, often costing hundreds of thousands of pounds per year. The simple reason for this is that increasing and athlete’s physical strength is one of the quickest ways to boost performance. This might seem obvious in sports such as Rugby, Wrestling or even Sprinting but the benefits of strength are vitally important for athlete’s on the other end of the sporting continuum as well. Endurance athletes would benefit greatly from resistance training as it increases their capacity to produce force. An athlete that is able to produce more force has two advantages over his or her competitors – a) they are able to produce more force and go faster or b) they are able to perform at the same pace with less effort. The challenge for endurance athletes in regards to strength training is fitting it in alongside already busy training schedule. From experience, I have found that the best way to incorporate strength training into an endurance athlete is to perform it outside of their competitive schedule for a period of 3-6 months. This provides ample to increase their strength to levels that will have a beneficial impact on performance.
3. Decreased Risk of Injury
Weight training, done correctly, can help reduce your risk of injury in a variety of ways. Firstly, weight training not only increases the strength of the muscles themselves but also the bones and connective tissues that support them. This makes them more resistant to injuries that occur as a result of an impact, rapid change of direction or sudden increases in velocity. Second, learning proper movement patterns can help ensure you use your muscular system in the most effective way possible and avoid overloading weaker muscles that are more susceptible to injury. For example, most lower back injuries, which are common throughout the general population, are caused as result of lifting heavy objects or twisting the spine while lifting. This type of injury is easily prevented with the aid of an exercise called the Deadlift. The Deadlift strengthens all of the muscle’s of the posterior chain, particularly the hamstrings, glutes and lower back. This alone makes them less prone to injury when lifting anything heavy from the ground. Learning the proper technique for the deadlift reduces the risk of injury even further by ensuring that the glutes and hamstrings do the bulk of the work when lifting, taking much of the stress off of the lower back.
Final Thoughts
For beginners, three sessions per week focusing on achieving progressive overload in the basic barbell exercises (the Press, Squat, Bench Press and Deadlift) is more than sufficient to produce rapid, meaningful results in your first six months of training. As I’ve described above, many of these benefits will be physical but it’s important to note that there are many psychological benefits that can be derived from strength training as well. Weight training has been shown to be anxiolytic, reducing symptoms of anxiety and depression and it’s progressive nature makes it an excellent means for building self-confidence. This makes it a great modality of exercise for anyone that suffers from issues that derive from a low sense of self-esteem. There innumerable benefits of strength training but many of them will be highly individual and can only be discovered by you personally, which means there’s only one thing left for you to do – pick up the bar and start lifting some weights!
