The Benefits of Weight Training: Why Everyone Should Lift Weights
If you are seeking new ways to improve your health, then strength training should be at the top of your list! Lifting weights involves one or more muscle groups to perform a task such as squatting, which has a major contribution to your health. Lifting weights is not only beneficial to your health, find out why you should weight train below.
What is Weight Training?
Weight training, also known as resistance training or strength training, is a form of physical exercise that uses weights or resistance bands to improve muscle development, strength, and endurance. By lifting weights, or using resistance bands, specific muscle groups are worked to progressively stimulate muscle growth.
The Benefits of Weight Training
1. Weight Training Improves Mental Wellbeing
Exercise is excellent not just for our physical health, but for our mental health too. Lifting weights has a major contribution in helping to cope with depression, reducing anxiety and raising your self-esteem. According to the World Health Organisation, more than 264 million people worldwide live battling mental health every day that’s why our professionals recommend weight training.
This day and age can be stressful for everyone, and we can all get anxious from time to time. The feeling of restlessness and worry, shaking and muscle tension are all symptoms of anxiety. Strength training leads to a significant reduction in symptoms of anxiety and is worth bearing in mind.
Training with weights helps to release endorphins, which are hormones that relieve stress and help to fight depression. Releasing endorphins also contributes to overall happiness which is why everyone should lift weights.
2. Weight Training Burns Body Fat
The more muscle you build, the more you keep burning your body fat. You would burn more calories from an hour of cardio than you would from an hour of weight training, your body’s metabolism will continue to burn calories after your workout whilst you are sitting at home binging your favourite TV show.
Why? Your muscle mass largely determines your resting metabolic rate — how many calories you burn by just living and breathing.
3. Weight Training Reduces Your Risk of Injury
You may be thinking, why should everyone lift weights? Well, weight training helps your range of motion and mobility by increasing efficiency and performance as well as reducing fatigue and any chance of injury. Therefore, the more you train your muscles the more you’ll find landings take to your joints better. This is because strengthening the muscles around your joints will protect them as you exercise.
It is highly important you protect your joint and ligaments from causing an injury throughout your exercise, lifting weights ensures you wake up without any aches and pains. If you’re worried about beginning your journey lifting weights for fear of injury, why not speak to one of our personal trainers who can guide you as you begin to lift weights?
4. Weight Training Improves Body Strength
Another reason why everyone should weight train is that lifting weights increases the power and strength of your muscles without majorly adding bulk or size to your body. Improving your body strength allows everyday physical tasks to become more manageable and easier.
Maintaining your weight training routine will slowly increase the number of weights you can manage, allowing you to gradually build up your body strength. Another benefit to weight training is that you will look stronger, heavy weight lifting leads to increasing your muscle mass and definition, however, this also depends on nutrition, you have to be eating enough of the right foods to build muscle mass. This means that you can be strong without looking big, something many people worry about.
5. Weight Training Improves Heart Health
Strength training is an anaerobic form of exercise, which allows your body to create a burst of energy to produce motion. Unlike aerobic or cardio exercises, these moves don’t require external oxygen consumption and allow you to work out with very high intensity for very short periods of time.
As an anaerobic form of exercise, strength training increases the heart rate and blood pressure to higher levels than what you would see in regular jogging. Heavyweight training is similar to sprinting in that you can only do both for a short amount of time because it requires such a high amount of energy exertion.
There is no better time than now!
There is no better time to start strength training than now and join your local gym. There are numerous amounts of health benefits to strength training, such as stronger bones, a lower risk of heart disease and diabetes, better brain health and mood, and improved self-esteem.
Strength training is not just lifting weights at the gym, you can get into great shape by adding resistance training into your routine with resistance bands, free weights, or items around the house. Whether you’re new or experienced, everyone should consider weight training.
Recap of The Benefits to Weight Training
- Improves Mental Wellbeing
- Burns Body Fat
- Reduces the Risk of Injury
- Improves Body Strength
- Improves Heart Health
We have a range of facilities at Bicester Gym to suit a variety of workout goals. Our facilities include our High Performance Gym or our Health Club which is excellent for beginners. If you would like to take a look at the range of facilities we have to offer at Bicester Health Club, then feel free to contact us today, and one of our friendly members can arrange to give you a full tour and discuss your goals and needs.
If you are looking for more ways to improve your health and well-being then why not consider Cold Water Swimming, our facilities include a 200 m outdoor swimming lake, find out 5 Benefits of Cold Water Swimming here.
