Strength training is as important as aerobics for a longer and healthier life

While the word ‘fitness’ automatically translates to running, swimming, and cycling in the minds of most people, lifting weights and strength training is as important as aerobics and can often be more beneficial.

The importance of regular physical activity and maintaining fitness isn’t lost on society in general. The words ‘fitness’ and ‘physical activity’ can lead us to think of conventional aerobic exercises like running, swimming, walking, jogging or cycling. However, recent studies and continuous developments in this realm suggests that muscle-strengthening exercises and endurance training is also very crucial and can have a huge impact on our overall health and well-being.

In fact, it can even be argued that strength training is as important if not more than aerobic exercises and should be done regularly.

Muscle strengthening exercises, often known as strength, waist, or resistance training or even ‘lifting weights’ includes the use of weight machines, exercise bands, hand-held weights like barbells and dumbbells, or even just the body weight (with exercises like push ups, pull ups, crunches, squats, lunges among others). While strength training is usually done at fitness centres and gyms, they can even be performed at home.

The benefits of strength training and muscle building are immense. Years of scientific research, data analytics and studies have demonstrated that lifting weights can lead to increased muscle mass, muscular definition, greater strength and increased bone density. Moreover, it also improves the body’s ability to clear sugar and fat from the bloodstream, thus leading to weight loss and lowering the chances of diabetes.

Strength training makes the body more functional and helps daily activities like walking up a flight of stairs, lifting heavy weights at home, sitting in a chair and getting up easier and it has also shown to reduce signs and symptoms of anxiety and depression.

It can also lead to better sleep quality and ability to relax the body.

Large studies have also been conducted in the area of life quality versus level of strength training. It has been shown that regular fitness users who lift weights at least two to three times a week are at lesser risk of early death, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and obesity.

More importantly though, these health benefits have been observed over a diverse panel of subjects and are found regardless of other factors such as age, sex, education, income, body mass index, depression and high blood pressure.

When compared to aerobic exercises like walking, jogging, running, cycling, it has also been proven that muscle-building workouts lead to greater effects on age-related diseases such as sarcopenia (muscle wasting), cognitive decline as well as physical function of the body.

While the health benefits of strength training are abundantly clear and have been well established since decades, the reality is that most people do not lift weights or don’t do it frequently enough. Numbers from multiple countries show that only 10-30% of most adults fit the criteria of performing strength training at least twice or thrice a week.

Strength training also has an advantage over aerobics in the fact that simply doing cardiovascular exercises can lead the body to burn muscle along with the fat. However, lifting weights and combining with low intensity cardio can help the body to protect and even build more muscle while simultaneously burning fat slowly.