Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights_ - Alex Hutchinson [40]
This is unfortunate, because muscular strength is a crucial ingredient of success in virtually every sport—not to mention its benefits for day-to-day life. And researchers are now realizing that fighting the gradual loss of muscle mass that begins in your 30s is among the most effective tactics to slow down the physical effects of aging. Whether you do it in a weight room or at home, using weights or machines or simply the weight of your body, strength training should be a part of your exercise program. It’s no longer just about big muscles—although, if you do want to attain those classical proportions, this is the place to start.
Do I need strength training if I just want to be lean and fit?
If you’ll pardon the broad generalization, there are basically two kinds of people at the gym: the ones on the cardio machines hoping to get or stay thin, and the ones on the weight machines trying to bulk up. If you’re among the former group, you might think there’s not much point in wasting your time doing weights. But you’d be wrong.
For health benefits, aerobic exercise gets most of the attention. It’s the go-to activity if you want to reduce your risk of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, dementia, and so on. Strength training, on the other hand, is generally thought of in functional terms: it will help you sprint faster, throw farther, jump higher, and look better in a bathing suit. But there’s a lot more overlap than we once thought. For example, recent studies have found that strength training helps people with diabetes regulate their glucose and insulin levels, in some cases more effectively than aerobic training. It can also help control conditions ranging from high blood pressure to depression.
Most important, though, are the benefits you get from strength training that you can’t get from other types of exercise. Starting in your 30s, you can expect to lose as much as 1 to 2 percent of your muscle mass each year for the rest of your life. This has incredibly important implications for your prospects of aging gracefully. If you want to be able to move a piece of furniture or lift a bag of groceries—or, later, be able to push yourself up from a chair—you need to hang on to the muscles you’ve got.
Maintaining your muscle mass also has more subtle effects. The muscle throughout your body is of “high metabolic quality,” as McMaster University researcher Stuart Phillips puts it. That means that it’s the primary location for burning fat and taking glucose out of your bloodstream, and the biggest contributor to your resting metabolic rate. As the amount of muscle in your body shrinks, you burn fewer calories and your ability to metabolize food gets worse, leaving you more vulnerable to obesity, diabetes, and other conditions.
Surprisingly, strength training also plays a key role in maintaining strong bones (see Chapter 8). We tend to think of weight-bearing activity as being the key to bone health—but it’s clear that can’t be the whole story, otherwise our arm bones would shrink to nothing. Instead, the “mechanostat theory” that emerged in the 1980s argues that the stress that prompts bones to grow stronger is provided by muscles. As a result, strength training is now considered one of the most important ways of keeping your bones strong.
Everybody at the gym has different goals (and of course, they’re far more varied than simply losing weight or gaining muscle). But whether you’re after health, performance, or simply maintaining the quality of your daily life, you need to spend at least a bit of time on strength training.
How much weight should I lift, and how many times?
The legend of Milo of Croton, a six-time Olympic champion wrestler in the sixth century BC whose training is said to have involved lifting a calf over his head every day until it became a full-grown cow, teaches us two lessons about weight training. First, your workload needs to progress if you want to keep improving. Second, the precise details of what equipment