Part 1/6: JL’s guide on how to get your ideal body and keep it for life.
A lot of people have misconceptions about weight lifting. They think they’ll get bigger, not leaner. They see these pictures of pumped up body-builders posing onstage, flexing these huge, inflated-looking muscles and it scares them off.
Really, folks, you only get that big if you literally force your body to get that big from ingesting huge amounts of calories, taking copious amounts of supplements, and lifting heavy, heavy weights over a long time period to achieve that result.
But see, you don’t have to strive for that body unless you want to. You can also use weight lifting to achieve a healthy, lean body with little visible muscle mass, and just lots of definition and sculpting ( like athletes, movie stars and fitness models etc).
Today, let’s talk about what you can really expect, benefit wise, from making a weight training regime a part of your life.
First, What is Strength Training, Really?
Before we get started talking about all the benefits of strength training, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page in our definition of “strength training.”
Any time you’re using your own weight or weights and weight machines to challenge your body and build strength, this is called strength training.
The goal of strength training is to challenge your muscles, build your strength, burn fat and calories, and acquire lean muscle mass that continues to burn calories long after you put the weights down.
If you want to achieve a beautiful, lean body, you simply create the right protocol which generally entails lifting slightly lighter weights and doing more controlled reps, and if you start to get too muscular, you can always add cardio to complement. A lot of people only lift three or four days a week and do cardio sprints two or three times a week for this very reason. In saying that workout frequency is a specific variable that is adapted to the individuals goals and rate of change. Something a good personal trainer can understand and prescribe accordingly.
So why is it that strength training is quickly becoming the go-to method for people looking to get fit?
Quite simply because when it comes to having a complete body transformation, from fat and flabby to lean and sculpted, strength training is your answer.
Here are my top five reasons why strength training will change your body and your life forever. There are many more worth mentioning, however these are my favourites:
1- You Will Look Better Naked
There is nothing wrong with wanting to look great. In fact, this is typically the chief motivational force behind many good, healthy behaviours.
Looking good comes from within and is always a result of hard work, especially past the age of 23 or so when things start to down regulate.
Strength training gives us the power to sculpt our bodies like a work of art. Much like a sculptor, we can literally trim away all the unnecessary flab on our body to reveal the beautiful statue within.
Strength training is the one type of training we can do that will allow us to focus on exactly what part of the body we want to improve, too. In fact, it’s through targeted recruitment of muscle and movement that the body begins to change shape.
Strength training, done correctly will
All of these aspects of weight lifting will make you much happier when you look in the mirror, and you’ll look better in everything from a T-shirt to a tank top, to nothing, if you’re looking to own that naked look.
2- Strength training bulletproofs the skeleton
Strength training has myriad benefits for our bones and our skeleton. Weight lifting can improve bone density, bone strength, and decrease bone loss in the elderly. Exercise and weight lifting improve the skeletal system by encouraging synovial fluid generation, which helps joints and bones to move. For this reason, even for adults with osteoarthritis, weight training can greatly improve pain and enhance movement.
3- Strength training and cognitive benefits
Strength training has been found to improve cognitive function and mood significantly. This seminal study by O’Connor, Herring, and Caravalho demonstrates that among the many cognitive benefits of strength training are that it
It even improves cognitive function in seniors.
4- Weight Training Influences Your Hormones to Reveal the Best You!
Hormones are a big deal for both health and aesthetics, and hormones often work against us in all kinds of ways.
When it comes to hormones, most people immediately think of them as controlling our sex drive and other things related to sex and reproduction.
And estrogen and testosterone do this, but they do a lot of other important things as well. Estrogen, testosterone, and other hormones such as adrenaline, cortisol, and insulin, also control our weight, muscle development, metabolism, and fat accumulation as well.
Hormones and Weight Gain
Overall, hormones help to achieve balance in the body: balance of hydration, balance of electrolytes, and balance of blood pressure. Most importantly, these little messengers are the chief agents that control our metabolism.
Of course, one of the reasons women gain weight before, during, and after menopause is because of the loss of hormones which control and rev up the metabolism. So the metabolism slows and gets really sluggish.
Another reason many women gain weight around this time is that this hormone loss often creates sleep-related problems, such as insomnia and frequent wake ups during the night, so they are never entering that fourth stage of delta wave sleep, when we get reparative sleep and burn off fat from exercise or dieting earlier during the day.
Men can get adrenal fatigue as well, especially during times of extreme stress, whether that be through physical performance or an overload in any other areas of life ie work, relationships, sleep etc
You can get this hormonal burnout from any kind of excessive stress though, emotional, mental, or physical. When your adrenaline flat lines, which controls your fight/flight hormones, then cortisol kicks in to supplement energy and since cortisol feeds on fat, your body rapidly produces fat cells for more energy to thrive on, and these fat cells act as an endocrine gland, attracting and storing more fat.
So How Does Strength Training Have A Favourable Influence On Hormones?
Weight training can positively impact our most important hormones, ones that control blood sugar, our metabolism, our weight gaining capacity, and our overall body composition
Weight Training Improves Insulin Sensitivity
Countless studies today provide evidence on how weight training can positively impact our insulin resistance and blood sugar management. Not only does weight lifting have a powerfully positive effect on insulin resistance in average men and women, it also helps improve blood sugar levels and insulin resistance in individuals that already have diabetes.
This insulin sensitivity enhancement only continues to improve as one acquires more lean muscle mass. Research also shows that multiple sets of weight lifting have proven the most effective at improving insulin sensitivity than single sets.
Weight Lifting Elevates Testosterone: The Power Hormone
A 2007 study, researchers found that strength training elevates testosterone as much as 40% in men after weight training. You can read the entire study here.
This means weight lifting can help men with Low T to recapture their energy levels, their sex drive, their motivation, and get rid of the belly fat accumulation—all of which accompany loss of testosterone levels as one ages. For younger men, then, testosterone makes you feel especially great.
Weight training also helps increase testosterone in women. One of the primary factors that depletes energy in women approaching menopause is not the loss of estrogen so much as testosterone. Testosterone is our “energy” hormone, and we need this to be energetic, driven, motivated, and happy as well, as it is a powerful mood elevator. Testosterone is also the hormone responsible for acquiring lean muscle mass gains and fat loss.
This is why as we all age, we feel depressed, un-sexy, and experience a debilitating loss of energy. For women or men, then, with adrenal fatigue or for individuals wanting to prevent hormonal burnout, weight lifting can be especially helpful.
Weight Lifting Balances Cortisol: The Fat Hormone
As I mentioned earlier, stress stimulates a release in the hormone cortisol which can negatively impact our body in all kinds of ways, especially in lowering our metabolism and creating fat cells to supply adrenaline when the adrenals are exhausted. Strength training greatly reduces stress by releasing endorphins, which are chemicals produced in the brain during times of pain and stress; they also improve your mood and decrease tension.
The way this works is that by working with weights, we stress and tear muscles, and this stressing and tearing increases endorphin production based on the intensity and duration of exercise. You can maximize this stress reduction from endorphins with a multi-joint weight-lifting workout and rest periods between sets.
Weight training promotes growth hormone (GH) production:
Weight lifting is the best method of accomplishing growth hormone (GH) release in the body, also called exercise induced growth hormone release (EIGR).
And this release of growth hormone is determined by how much we lift and how many reps we do as well. Also, trying to do lifts that work multiple body parts can result in more GH release as well.
Weight training lowers estrogen
Lowering estrogen is good for you. For men, too much estrogen can destroy testosterone in the body, making us weaker, flabbier, and fatter.
This is because estrogen and testosterone begin battling for the same androgen receptors, with estrogen often winning. Weight training in men lowers estrogen, relieving us of that worry. Also, eating right and losing weight can help to lower estrogen as well, and the more muscle mass you build and the more fat you lose, the lower estrogen will be in the body.
For women, increasing muscle mass and lowering estrogen can reduce the risk of breast cancer and help combat depression as well. Overall, building muscle and reducing adipose tissue all over the body, massively reduces the risk of cancer of any kind.
5- Strength training will give you better results faster!
Strength Training and Weight Loss
When it comes to sheer weight loss, when compared to cardio, strength training gives you
With weight lifting, you not only burn calories as you work out, you also build up calorie and fat burning muscle that lasts long after you achieve you target weight. So, yes, you can actually sit and burn calories.
Weight Lifting= Fast Results
One thing that’s great about weight training is it builds muscle fast. You’ll feel the strength and muscle developing within days to a week. What this does for individuals who are overweight is to yield those immediate results that translate into you not giving up so easy on weight loss and getting fit.
Weight training allows you to burn fat long after you finish lifting.
If you’ve been reading about strength training, you’ve probably heard this term “EPOC.” EPOC stands for excessive-post exercise oxygen consumption. Translation—you burn more calories long after your workout. When you begin training with high intensity, your body builds up what is called an “oxygen debt” which makes the body work harder after the workout to “catch up” and pay off that debt, so to speak. That process of the body trying to catch up on oxygen burns more calories, so you get that “after-burn” effect.
Overall, research evidences that lifting keeps the metabolism revving long after your strength training session, and if you really want to burn calories, lift at least 85% of your maximum capacity.
This is the reason that people wanting to lose weight love weight lifting–because they get that calorie burn that lasts and immediate muscle tone that burns calories too. So you can actually eat a little more and still lose weight, meaning weight loss without so much hunger. You cannot beat that.
Overall Benefits According to Research
Overall, as a 2012 article in the Journal Current Sports Medical Report, “Strength Training is Medicine” the benefits of strength training are far ranging, and researchers have found that just ten weeks of weight training
Many benefits indeed.
I hope this have given you some new, proven reasons to get started with weight training now, so that you can enjoy the myriad rewards it can literally rain upon your life.
I’d love to hear any questions you have about what weightlifting can do for you!
Please let me hear from you!
Thanks,
Jackson Litchfield