Chapter 1: Why Strength Train?

Strength Training is not just for men

Why Strength Train?

When it comes to changing your body, improving your health, and enhancing your fitness level, nothing is going to be more powerful than strength training.

Far too many people who want to lose fat and firm up turn straight to the cardio machines thinking that this is the most optimal way for them to make progress.

But is it?

The fact of the matter is that cardio training really doesn’t challenge the body in any significant way.  Sure, you may find that you do lose some weight, but you won’t necessarily be losing body fat, but rather, lean muscle mass.

You aren’t providing that great of an overloading stimulus thus you aren’t encouraging the body to sustain all of its lean muscle tissue.

With the constant pounding and ongoing motion that you use with a standard steady state workout program, if anything, you’ll just encourage the body to lose lean muscle mass since it’s a burden to have to transport over great distances.

Your lean muscle mass tissue is the type of tissue that burns the most calories at rest, thus helps you sustain a higher metabolic rate (and enhances fat burning all day long), so it’s tissue that you simply cannot afford to lose.

Strength training on the other hand does provide that overloading stimulus that is going to get the muscles sitting up and responding, growing back stronger than they were before.

Let’s look at some of the key benefits that this form of exercise provides.

Enhanced Metabolic Rate

The first of the key benefits that you’ll get from performing a resistance training program is a dramatically enhanced metabolic rate.  Not only will you be burning up plenty of calories while you’re performing your resistance training session assuming you do perform it with great intensity, but you’ll also experience a higher metabolic rate for up to 48 hours after the workout is completed.

This is important because the higher you can sustain your resting metabolic rate, the more resistant you become to future fat gain.

          

This also means that you don’t have to be quite as strict with your diet on a day to day basis to maintain your weight as well, which can definitely come in handy. You know as well as anyone that when your day is packed with meetings, client calls, and whatever else is demanding your attention, seeking out the healthiest food options can sometimes feel like mission impossible.

Improved Muscular Strength Levels

The second key benefit of a proper strength training program is enhanced muscular strength levels.  Simply put, as time progresses on and you keep overloading the body with a greater and greater amount of weight as you go about your workout session, you’re going to be breaking the body down further, rebuilding it back up stronger, and as this process continues, you see massive increases in your overall strength level.

The stronger you are, the easier everyday tasks are going to feel and the more resistant you become to getting injured.

Do keep in mind though that you have to be pushing yourself with your workouts to see these strength gains. If you aren’t pushing yourself, you’ll just maintain the status quo.

Increased Insulin Sensitivity

From a health standpoint, one of the biggest benefits that a good resistance training program is going to offer is increased insulin sensitivity.  Insulin sensitivity refers to how well your body handles the carbohydrates that you consume.

Those who have good insulin sensitivity will have a tendency to shuttle the carbs they’re eating directly towards the muscle cells rather than the body fat tissues.

On the other hand, those who have poor insulin sensitivity will tend to struggle to maintain control over their glucose levels and when they consume carbohydrates, they are far more likely to be shuttled off to the body fat stores.

So the better your insulin sensitivity is, the leaner you tend to stay.

What’s more is that poor insulin sensitivity is one of the hallmarks of diabetes development, so if yours is suffering, this disease could be on its’ way.

Improved Cardiovascular Function

Next up on our list of benefits that strength training has to offer is improved cardiovascular function.  While most people tend to think that only cardio training is going to enhance your cardiovascular fitness level, this isn’t the case at all.

When performed in a certain manner, it’s definitely possible to get your heart rate up very high during a weight lifting session, providing dramatic benefits to your heart health.

In fact, you’ll find that you can get your heart rate up even higher in strength training workouts than you can in some cardio sessions.

A set of heavy squats done to the 10-15 repetition mark is enough to get anyone’s heart beating at a greatly accelerated rate.

This can then provide benefits against warding off cardiovascular disease as well as stroke.

Enhanced Self-Confidence And Mood

When you perform an intense weight lifting session, your body is going to release something called endorphins in the body, which are peptides that function as neurotransmitters and produce a ‘natural high’ in the body.

This can instantly help to put you in a better mood, while decreasing stress levels.  As you very likely would agree, anything that can help to reduce your daily stress level is going to be a very good thing.

In addition to improving your mood, strength training also has a profound way of improving your rate of self-confidence as well.

Those who strength train will gain a greater sense of accomplishment from their workouts as they see themselves making progress in terms of how strong they are and how fit they’re becoming, not to mention as the positive changes take place to their body.

This can then in turn enhance your self-confidence levels, which will carry over to all aspects of life – your career included.

There’s nothing quite as attractive as a confident individual, so this can really impact how others come to view you.

Improved Bone Strength

Finally, the last key benefit of strength training to note is that it’s one of the best ways to enhance bone strength.

Doing what you can to promote strong bones as you get older is extremely important so that you can maintain the healthy lifestyle that you love and a good weight training program will do just that.

You’ve likely heard before that weight-bearing exercises are the best types of exercises to do if you want to improve your degree of bone strength and this is true.

But, what is more weight bearing than strength training?

With strength training, you’re actually adding more weight to your body, making it more weight bearing than any other activity you’ve likely done before.

The end result is that you’ll get very strong bones developing as the bone remodelling process will be at an all-time high.

So there you can see some of the major benefits that you’ll get by putting together a very sound strength training workout.  It really is the most beneficial form of exercise that you could do, especially if you only have so much time to workout each week.

And what’s even better about this form of exercise is that it really won’t involve much of a time commitment on your part for you to see results taking place.  It’s a very low-time commitment, high-payoff activity, so perfect for the busy executive.

Hopefully now you’re hooked on the idea of getting started on your very own strength training workout routine.

Now let’s move on and talk about the differences between strength training and body building.