The Lesser-Known Benefits of Weight Training

Most everyone knows that strength training is good for you. The general idea that strength training makes you healthier and is something you probably should do is not anything revolutionary. However, what most people do not understand is that the benefits of strength training and weightlifting go beyond just getting you stronger, more “toned”, or building bigger muscles. In reality, resistance training is the fountain of youth that most people ignore in their fitness endeavors, as it has far reaching positive effects on metabolism, bone health, quality of life, and of course, muscle mass. I wanted to take some time today to highlight why we need strength training, and how no matter your age, sex, or training experience, you can benefit from implementing a strength training program.

Strength is more than just muscle

It is well known that beginners see a much more rapid development of strength in a shorter period of time than experienced lifters do. This is due to the fact that strength is not solely a product of muscle mass. Oftentimes we think that larger muscles = stronger body. While this isn’t necessarily wrong, there is more complexity to the muscular system of the body than you might think. When we begin weightlifting, the first changes that occur within the body are typically neuromuscular, not myofascial. Essentially what this means is that our bodies don’t develop new muscle at first, but instead learn to better utilize the muscle we already have through development of nervous system pathways. This is a more rapid process than development of more muscle (hypertrophy), which is why people typically see a big jump in their numbers in the first 6 weeks of training. Our bodies are learning to use the muscle it already has to the best of its ability before it wants to spend energy developing more muscle tissue. We may not see physical growth, but the strength gains are still quite apparent. Over the years, I have been approached by many clients with the worry that if they start lifting, they will get too bulky or muscular for their liking. Building large amounts of muscle takes a special kind of dedicated effort, and most people will still see strength gains and improvements in quality of life with a strength training program and not get “too big” in the process. This is because strength is more than muscle! When you train, you are training your nervous system too.

Weight training is the best thing you can do for your bones

Not many people understand that lifting weights is actually just as good for your bones as it is for your muscles. Maybe you’ve had worries that picking up a weight will cause damage to your joints, or put your vertebrae at risk to compress. Sure, improper lifting techniques and extremely heavy loads (think competitive weight lifting levels) can indeed cause high amounts of joint and spinal stress, but for the vast majority of the population who are just looking to workout and be healthier, these fears are irrational. So long as you have a good understanding of technique and are lifting within your ability, your bones and joints will highly benefit from weight training rather than be harmed by it. This phenomenon is known as Wolff’s Law, and it states that bones will adapt when placed under loads, basically becoming stronger the more they are put under stress. Muscle moves our body by contracting and pulling on bones. When they contract hard against a load, the stress they place on the respective bone causes it to increase in density and thickness. Though bone density issues are a problem for both sexes, women, especially those post-menopausal, are at the highest risk for bone density issues like osteoporosis and osteopenia. The absolute best way to mitigate the risk of developing these issues later in life is to improve your bone density as much as you can in your younger years, when your body is more responsive to adapting to stressors. In essence, weight lifting in your young years sets you up on a much greater trajectory when it comes to preserving bone mass as you age. 

Weightlifting is better for weight loss than you might think.

Although I covered this topic in much more detail in our previous blog post, I will give you a quick rundown on strength training and weight loss: When we gain muscle, a very calorically active tissue, we increase the amount of calories we burn at rest. Our bodies need to maintain this hungry tissue and so we expend more and more calories by simply existing when we gain more and more muscle. You can think of this as your resting metabolism going up. Typically, when it comes to weight loss intervention, we often rely on diets and calorie restriction to help us into a deficit. Though this is by far the most effective way to lose weight, it comes at a cost. Unfortunately, dieting to lose fat usually means we lose muscle mass as well. Any sort of long term calorie deficit comes with the risk of losing mass in the form of muscle tissue as well as fat. We can try our best to make our body only burn unwanted fat, but at the end of the day, the body will burn what it needs for energy, and that includes muscle when we’re in an intense deficit for a significant period of time. As I mentioned previously, muscle mass helps us burn more calories at rest. So by losing muscle with dieting, we also risk lowering our metabolism, making future weight loss more difficult. As you may have guessed, the best way to combat this is by supplementing weight training along with your dieting to ensure a minimal amount of muscle mass, and thus metabolism, is lost. 

Muscle helps us regulate our glucose

Those of you who are diabetic or at risk for diabetes know how vital glucose control is. It's also no secret that the body uptakes glucose during exercise to help fuel itself, and that exercise in general is one of the best ways to combat unwanted blood sugar changes. What you may not be familiar with is how strength training and skeletal muscle can play a huge role in glycemic control. Your body tends to store sugars for easy use in 3 major places: the blood as blood sugar, which is quite transient and changes based on energy demand or feeding, and in the liver and muscle as glycogen, a storage form of sugar. When the body needs to move its muscles quickly and rapidly, as you might expect to move in a weight training class, it wants to supply those muscles with energy as quickly as possible to meet the demand. Instead of wasting time and energy to move sugars around the body to the muscles where they will be used, the body is quite smart, and stores sugars in the form of glycogen right in the muscles where they will be used. This means that our muscles are always hungry for more sugars as we exercise, because the body wants to maintain its stores of glycogen. Training your muscles not only expends the stored glycogen, but also improves how much they can store. Bigger, stronger muscles means our ability to uptake blood glucose into storage is vastly improved! This can be quite effective when it comes to glycemic control in those who are diabetic or at risk. 

Strength is for longevity

I wanted to save this point for last because, in my opinion, this is the most important reason to strength train. I believe that there is still somewhat of a stigma behind strength training. People shy away from it because they don’t want to look big like Arnold, or they want to protect their spine and joints, or maybe they’re just intimidated by big barbells and plates. Weight training goes far beyond all of that. Strength is more than just big muscles and lifting the heaviest thing possible. Strength is the ability to support your body weight, it is the ability to get off a chair without using your arms. Strength is the capacity to go up and down the stairs to bring in groceries. It is the chance to get up and down off the floor to play with your kids, grandkids, or pets. It is so much more than big weights, tank tops, and protein shakes. This is the central tenant in which I founded Catalyst on. I want people to understand what it really means to be strong. If you come into a gym and train for a year and the only results you see are less back pain, or maybe increased balance and less fall risk, I consider that a huge success. You don’t have to start a resistance training program with the goal being to get as huge as possible. There are so many facets of strength that can be improved in the weight room. In my younger years I wanted to be as big and buff as possible. I wanted to deadlift 600lb, have huge biceps and all that jazz, what young guy doesn’t? But after years of working with clients of all ages and walks of life, I find that the real end goal of strength training is to keep your body’s ability to move as long as possible. I no longer need to be the biggest guy out there, I want to be the healthiest and most pain free person out there. I want to have a comfortable quality of life late into your senior years. I want to be pain free enough to play like a kid well into my 60s. Movement is so important to human existence, and we’d be doing ourselves a disservice by neglecting it, and that's why I choose to keep training.