On average adults lose three to five per cent of their muscle each
decade. Strength training reverses this trend by building and
maintaining muscle mass and strength. Strong muscles do much more than
help you to perform tasks more easily, they also prevent injuries,
support and protect your joints and improve posture.
Each of your muscles consists of many hundreds of muscle fibers
enclosed in a sheath of connective tissue. When you place a greater
than normal load on your muscles, the extra resistance causes minute
tears in these fibers. With rest, your body repairs these tears,
increasing the size of the fibers and creating stronger muscles.
Bone and muscle benefits
Weak or unbalanced muscles can pull your body out of alignment -
balanced strength training (combined with stretching) will help you to
maintain good posture. It will also improve your ligament and cartilage
thickness, strengthening your joints and helping ease any pain from
rheumatoid arthritis or osteoarthritis.
Strength training also puts stress on your skeleton. Like your muscles,
your bones respond to this resistance by increasing in mass. This
strengthens your bones, helping to protect against fractures and
degenerative conditions such as osteoporosis.
Although strength training does not burn as many calories as
cardiovascular training, it does increase your lean body weight. Each
kilo of muscle in your body burns around 75 calories per day just for
normal maintenance (during exercise this figure is much higher).
Increasing lean muscle mass means you burn more calories all day long,
boosting your metabolism and helping weight stay off.
Who can do it?
Everyone can benefit from strength training. Experts used to advise
that strength training was not suitable for children, but years of
exhaustive studies have found little evidence to substantiate these
claims. Moderate strength training helps long-term skeletal and joint
development, even in children, and studies show that post-menopausal
women suffer fewer hip fractures if they engaged in weight-bearing
activity as young girls.
As with any physical activity, parents should ensure that certain
precautions are taken. Children should perform bodyweight exercises
rather than using extra weights and should never perform spine-loading
exercises.
At the other end of the spectrum, strength training is equally
beneficial for older people, who often suffer from the effects of
muscle and bone degeneration. Muscle strength declines by 15 per cent
per decade after the age of 50 and 30 per cent per decade after the age
of 70 - adding just 1.5kg of muscle can reverse the effects of almost
five years worth of age-related muscle loss.
How to strength train
You don't need huge weights to make strength training worthwhile - the
important thing is to keep your tissues tones, not to build massive
muscles.
Bodyweight Exercises - are movements performed without additional
weight, using your own body mass for resistance. A good example of this
is the press-up. Although a little less productive than weighted
exercises, bodyweight training is ideal for beginners and can be
performed anywhere.
Weighted Exercises - are movements performed using additional weights
such as free weights (barbells and dumb-bells), weight stack machines
or a combination of both. Weighted exercises are often more productive
than bodyweight exercises because you can continuously increase the
amount of weight lifted, allowing your muscles to adapt to a higher
level.
When starting strength training you should choose at least one exercise
for each major muscle group. This will help to prevent muscle
imbalances, such as strong stomach muscles and weak back muscles, that
may pull your body out of alignment.
Start with exercises that target the larger muscle groups, such as your
leg muscles, and work towards the smaller ones. This allows you to do
the most physically demanding moves when you are the least fatigued.
Many women worry about developing large muscles with strength training,
but large muscles require high levels of the male hormone testosterone.
Most women have around one tenth of the testosterone levels of men and
smaller frames, making it difficult to build large muscles.
Women also tend to have weaker bones and are more susceptible to
osteoporosis than men, making the bone-building benefits of strength
training particularly important.
