Exercise benefits your body in numerous ways. Aerobic exercises like jogging or dancing can help improve your circulation, lower your cholesterol, improve your heart health, and improve your endurance. While strength-training exercises don’t offer the same cardiovascular benefits as aerobic exercises, they’re just as important.
The Benefits of Strength Exercise
Strength exercises have many physical and psychological benefits, including:
- Strengthening muscles and bones.
- Increasing resting metabolism (which leads to weight loss).
- Improving your posture.
- Reducing your stress and making you better able to handle stress.
- Making you look healthier.
- Reducing your risk of injury.
- Improving your ability to balance.
- Increasing your endurance for daily activities.
- Increasing your self-esteem, confidence, and sense of accomplishment.
Types of Strength Exercise
In order to start reaping the many benefits offered by strength-training exercises, you must actually do some. If you aren’t sure where to start, you might try any of the following:
- Resistance bands (great for low-impact workouts)
- Free weights
- Weight machines at the gym or at home
- Classes like Pilates
Strengthening Without Injury
It’s important to understand how to exercise before you begin. If you aren’t sure how to use any of these methods, you might consider the help of a personal trainer or an exercise video. Without proper instruction, you risk injuries that can set back both your weight loss and your overall health. Here are some general strength exercise tips:
- When working out, lift slowly and use controlled movements. Strength training is not about moving as quickly as possible, but it’s about really exercising your muscles. Slow, controlled movements help you do that and reduce your risk of injury.
- Use lower-back supports if necessary and be sure to have the correct posture. If the weights you’re using make you stoop forward, they may be too heavy, so choose the next weight down.
- It might sound obvious, but it’s important to breathe while you do your strength exercises. The best way to do this is to exhale during the hardest part of the exercise and inhale during the easiest. You might exhale as you initially lift the weight and inhale as you put it back in the starting position.
- If the weight you use makes you reduce your range of motion for the exercise, then choose a lighter weight.
- Start out slow with sets of no more than 12 reps. As you gain strength, you can gradually increase to multiple sets of 12 to 15 repetitions.