How Weight Lifting Delivers Top Health Benefits

It’s a fact that most individuals participate in weight lifting strictly for aesthetic purposes, but, this isn’t the case for some people. Instead, this minority is more interested in the health benefits weight lifting will provide and weight lifting does deliver top health benefits.

Most people who lift weights aren’t even aware of the myriad health and fitness benefits of their weight training program. A few of the benefits are increased bone density resulting in fewer injuries, an increase in metabolic rate, and decreased levels of stress.

Let’s take a look at each of these benefits in more detail:

Increased Bone Density

Many people have the belief that the best exercise to increase bone density is running. This is a misconception. Actually, running promotes breakdown of bone and muscle tissue.  

Weight lifting is an anabolic process which promotes building tissue, thus helping to increase your bone density. This will aid in warding off osteoporosis and fractures due to stress in future years. Not only will weight lifting help to preserve your bone mass, but it causes far less impact on joints than going for an hour long run.

Fewer Injuries

When you lift weights you are not only strengthening your muscles, but you are also working the tendons and ligaments that connect bones, muscles and other tissues. This will greatly reduce the likelihood of injury when participating in other activities.

You know how frustrating an injury can be if you’ve ever had one. The majority of injures are the result of a tendon, or ligament, or muscle being too weak to withstand the stress placed on it. Since weight lifting gets to all those tendons and ligaments, it is considered one of the best exercises to help prevent injury.

Reduced Health Related Risks

Research suggests that regular weight training positively affects your overall health. The incidence of insulin resistance, high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease and cancer are believed to be less in people who participate in regular weight training workouts.

The absolute best prevention program for developing these chronic  problems is a weight training program coupled with a well thought out diet of nutrient rich whole foods.

How to Prevent Fat Gain

If you are one of the rare few who want to gain weight, skip over this section. However, if you are one of the majority who considers weight gain a problem, please read on.

The more weight you lift, the more muscle you will gain; the more muscle gain, the higher your metabolism will be; the higher your metabolism, the more you can eat and maintain your current weight.  If you aren’t trying to gain weight, I’d say that’s a big plus in favor of a weight lifting program. 

A big problem with lifting weights is the belief that this type of program will make you big, bulky and unattractive. This, quite simply, is not true.

Let’s use an analogy to help illustrate how this works.

Let’s pretend that there two teams who have been given an assignment to build a house that uses the same building techniques. One team is given 1,000 bricks, but the second team is given a whopping 10,000 bricks to build this house.

It’s obvious that the team with 10,000 bricks will build the bigger house. Now, translate those bricks into calories. It’s only when you feed your body an excess of calories that you will gain weight.  

Bodybuilders look like bodybuilders not only because of how they train, but also because of the way they eat. If you have ever been around a teenage boy, then you know how much food can be consumed during rapid periods of growth.) Sufficient calories must be supplied for growth, whether it is for gain in height during puberty or building bigger muscles later in life.  

Is it possible to build a house with no building materials? 

Likewise, you can’t build big muscles if the necessary building blocks (amino acids, carbohydrates and good fats) aren’t supplied in large quantity.

So, don’t fall for the lie that would have you believe that because you lift weights that you’re going to get big bulky muscles. Unless you increase your food intake considerably, this won’t happen to you.

So, hopefully it is clear now that just because you’re lifting weights, it does not mean you will end up with bulky muscles as a result.  Many people make this incorrect assumption – but it really is the diet that makes all the difference in how this weight lifting will shape your body.

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About the Author:

Gene Cook
http://www.GainMuscleSite.com

Gene specializes in helping people achieve their desired body physique without drugs and expensive supplements and is interested helping them find the workout routine that works best for them.