The Benefits of Weightlifting for Lifetime Fitness
Weight lifting or weight training has increased in popularity over the last twenty years enormously and continues to rise. The simple reason is that the benefits of getting and feeling strong are available to all people who spend the time and effort in getting these rewards.
Weight lifting or training with weights can be isolated into four different methods. They are constant resistance, isometric and variable resistance and isokinetic resistance. Also isometric resistance is the least common or the least popular of all these techniques it still has extremely good results.
It seems that people and scientists will never agree completely on which offer the best improvements in strength, endurance and power performance. But the lifetime benefits of weight training have without a doubt been conclusively proven by sports science and medicine.
The improvements that have been shown to occur when training with weights are not only improvements in cardiovascular measurements which can be seen with this activity as reported by C.M Reid and a few other studies published in the British Journal of Sports and Medicine.
For example one advantage is if you maintain a heart rate of approximately 70% of the maximum rate, for at least 20 minutes, 3 times/week over an 8 week period you will see the improvement by yourself. This is fitness and also the ability to cope with stress by there are other benefits of achieving this fitness.
Cellular alterations occur with this exercise, which may result in an improvement in the oxidative capacity of the muscle. When this happens, the local muscle mass grows, then VO2 max also increases and lean weight is higher too. A notorious thing as well, is the loss of body fat.
The loss of body fat is going to happen even if you eat the same amount of calories you were eating before you start to get fit. The reason is that the exercise has proven itself to speed up your metabolism for up to 8 hours after you have exercised.
What you see is that weight training, can increase your metabolism because the muscle burns more calories, so the more muscle you have, the more calories you’ll burn all day long and most of this calories will be from fat. This will simply make you feel good and look good which is something most people can achieve with a little effort and routine.
This type of exercise can also strengthen bones, especially important for women. Women seem to suffer with the thinning of bones as they get older a little more than men do and the increase of muscle has shown to also increase the bone strength and density by 2% and more.
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