Strength training

Last week I suggested that interval training is important for losing fat. Awesome. Hopefully you’ve included that as part of your training.

This week I’m going to discuss something that everybody should be doing – strength training, and when I say everybody, I mean, if you’re reading this then YOU should be doing strength training. Now, many of you will have read that and thought ‘but I don’t really want to be big or muscly’, this a very normal thought for people to have but it is misguided.

You see, strength training will not make you into a muscle-bound meathead overnight. Many people will spend decades lifting iron and never get as big as they want to be so the thought that a few weeks of strength training will turn you into the next Arnold Schwarzenegger is not realistic at all.

Another factor of why the fears of becoming too big have never been actualised is what we call ‘homeostasis’, this basically means that the human body doesn’t actually want to get huge; it wants to always stay the same. The only reason it progresses and gets bigger is to adapt to the training that you have been through.

So, when you get to a size you think is big enough, then you can maintain that size by simply using the same weights each session, the body will no longer need to adapt to become bigger as it already can lift these weights.

Once you’ve lost the fear of hulking up overnight, you can experience the many benefits of strength training, not just in the mirror, but with complete health. Strength training has been shown to reduce the risk of arthritis, heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, chronic back pain, depression, dementia, Alzheimer’s and chronic hypertension.

All of a sudden, strength training sounds a whole lot more appealing….

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