5 Reasons You Should Be Strength Training. Yes You!

Strength training can help you lose weight, increase your lean muscle mass and enhance your quality of life all while increasing your overall strength. Here are 5 reasons why including strength training, two or more days a week[i], is an important building block for a healthy body.

Enhance Your Cardio Performance

The benefits of cardio are undeniably important to your health and fitness, but you should consider incorporating strength training into your routine to help increase your performance.  Strength training can increase your endurance, stability and mobility leading to better cardio performance. It can also help prevent injuries by developing and strengthening the muscles in your body, which will keep you running, cycling and climbing for the long haul.

Don’t Worry You Won’t ‘Bulk Up’ from working Out…Unless you want to!… (CLICK HERE for more)

Let’s put this common misconception to rest, shall we? Building muscle does not go hand-in-hand with bulking up. If you don’t want big bulky muscles from weight training, then you will not get them. In fact, to significantly increase muscle mass you must follow a specialized and intense workout routine and diet. Strength training will help you decrease your body, and since body fat has more volume than muscle you will actually look smaller. The bottom line, you won’t bulk-up and get big muscles unless you make a calculated effort to do so.

Strengthen Your Confidence

Weight lifting can strengthen your body as well as your self-confidence.  With a little determination, commitment and proper form you can achieve results. Seeing yourself progress and change physically is an amazing feeling you are certain to feel great about. And…the compliments people give you are a nice bonus.

Stay Youthful

Living a happy and active lifestyle is presumably a primary goal of yours if you’re an avid Living Healthy reader. In order to keep your body up to speed with the activities you enjoy you have to keep your body strong.[ii] Maintaining your strength with a consistent strength training routine is essential to your current and future physical fitness.[iii]

How to Get Started with Strength Training – Take a Lift of Faith!

The idea of beginning a strength training routine with limited experience can be intimidating. The best way to make a smooth transition into your strength training program is to find a few basic exercises and plug them into your current gym routine. As you become more comfortable, take the time to learn a new exercise every week until you have a workload you are happy with.

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[i] This information was obtained from http://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/everyone/guidelines/adults.html

[ii] This information was obtained from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7493203

[iii] This information was obtained from  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3312297/