Strength Training

Use resistence to contract your muscles: help build strength, anaerobic endurance and your skeletal muscles. Strength training tones the muscles and burns fat, helping improve overall health and well-being. Training increases bone, muscle, tendon and ligament strength as well as toughness, improved joint function, increased bone density, metabolism, and reduced potential for injury. Strength training and weight loss results are also well documented, since you receive a more toned body and stronger muscles.

 

 

Why Strength Training is Different

Rather than being a sport, strength training is exercising. Unlike bodybuilding, weightlifting, powerlifting or strongman, the emphasis is not on building the "biggest muscle," it's about toning and overall health.

Many sports use strength training workouts as a part of their training regime. Both strength training men and strength training women who practice hockey, football, baseball, swimming, track and field, and more, use strength training exercises to help boost bone density, increase bone and muscle efficiency.

Benefits of Strength Training

First off, you look and feel better with strength training. Strength training helps improve balance, flexibility, mobility and stability for comfortable living. If you've ever been injured, using strength training can help you rabilitate the injured area, recover, and prevent the injury from reoccuring. This is because strength training workouts help build the muscles around the injured area, strengthening your muscles and joints.

 

 

Strength Training Workouts

There are seveal types of strength exercising, each with their own benefits.

'The goal of resistance training is to "gradually and progressively overload the musculoskeletal system so it gets stronger."' - American Sports Medicine Institute (ASMI).

• Weight training: the use of gravity (weight stacks, dumbbels or plates) or elastic resistance to oppose muscle contraction.
• Resistance strength training: effort is performed against a specific opposing force generated by a resistence. It helps strengthen and tone muscles, increase bone mass.
• Isometric training: there is no net movement in the individual as the exercises are meant to be opposed by a force qual to the force output of the muscle. This mainly strengthens the muscle at a specific joint angle.
• Integrated training: desires to improve all components necessary to allow one to achieve optimum performance, including: flexibitlity training, core stabilization, balance training, reactive training, speed training, resistence training, and nutrition and sports supplementation.

A basic strength training program includes: bench press, lat pulldowns, overhead press, bicep curls, squats, leg curls and extensions, abdominal crunches and more.

Intensity

The American College of Sports Medicine states that "strength training of a moderate intensity, sufficient to develop and maintain fat-free weight, should be an integral part of an adult fitness program. One set of 8-12 repetitions of eight to ten exercises that condition the major muscle groups at least 2 days a week is the recommended minimum."