If you want to stay healthy and toned well into old age, you need to understand the important of continuing strength training throughout your whole life. Do you hope to maintain quality of life as you grow older?
Is it important that you're able to perform your daily tasks, enjoy your recreational activities, and care for yourself? You probably would like to stay fit, trim, strong and mobile for as long as possible.
If you do happen to have some physical limitations, you would want to halt or maybe even improve your condition. This doesn't have to be just wishful thinking.
You can do more than just hope for a strong, mobile body as you age. It is possible to turn back the aging clock!
The myth is that as we grow older we get much weaker and suffer more aches and pains. We've been told that losing muscle and gaining fat are just part of the natural aging process.
The fact is that many of the symptoms of old age are really the symptoms of inactivity---of using our muscles less! Muscle weakness, bone loss, and sluggish metabolism are changes that accompany aging but are not solely caused by it.
Use it or lose it! No doubt you have heard this phrase before.
You can slow and possibly reverse many of the symptoms associated with aging. It is possible to turn back the clock.
By increasing your strength and flexibility, you can turn your wishful thinking into a reality! They still haven't found the fountain of youth, but something close to it.
More and more fitness experts are recommending strength training for health reasons--for women as well as men, older adults as well as younger adults. Strength training is extremely important in combating the age-related declines in muscle mass, bone density, and metabolism.
It is an effective way to increase muscle strength and to shed unwanted inches. Strength training also helps to decrease back pain, reduce arthritic discomfort, and help prevent or manage some diabetic symptoms.
Physical inactivity causes an average muscle loss of 5-7 pounds per decade. This muscle loss leads to a metabolic rate reduction of 2-5% per decade.
Calories that were previously used for muscle energy are put into fat storage, resulting in gradual weight gain. One study on older adults showed that a 3-month basic strength-training program resulted in the exercisers adding 3 pounds of muscle and losing 4 pounds of fat, while eating 15% more calories!
Researchers found that strength training can add bone density. Prior to this research, it was thought that women might be able to slow their bone loss, but not increase their bone density.
This new study shows that strength training at any age can actually add bone, not just slow its loss! Sensible work may be one of the best ways to get relief from your arthritis.
Not only will it help to lubricate and nourish the joint, but it will also strengthen the muscles around the joint, providing it with greater support. This is critical for combating frailty and disability, for increasing strength and mobility, and for staying active and self-sufficient.
Research has consistently shown the fitness and health benefits of training for older adults. You don't have to decline with age!
You can control these declines or even reverse them--it will have a great impact on the quality of your life as you grow older. It's never too late to turn back the clock with this powerful age eraser.
You can improve the quality of your life at any age or condition. Traditionally it was thought that it was normal to get weak and feeble as one aged.
We now know that this is not true--that inactivity is the culprit, not aging itself. But you are lucky--you have access to new research that wasn't available to the previous generations.
It is important to embrace new information, even if it means tossing out familiar ideas. If you want to stay fit, trim, strong, mobile, and physically independent as you age, then you should be strength training for 30 minutes, twice a week.
There isn't another investment that pays off as well. Start today!
Author Resource:-
Jack R. Landry has been writing about the exercise and health industry for years. He recommends using strength training equipment to stay healthy and fit.
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