1 – Maintain muscle in a calorie deficit
If you’re reducing your calorie intake, you run the risk of losing lean muscle mass along with fat. Without weight training your body grabs a large portion of its energy by cannibalizing the muscle you’ve worked so hard to keep! Cardio and diet alone are not enough to protect you from muscle takeover … strength training is a MUST!
2 – Burn more calories and increase fat loss
Strength training also contributes to your total daily energy expenditure while building muscle at the same time. Cardio isn’t the only calorie burner!
3 – Increase your metabolism
Strength training creates microtrauma to the muscle fibers, which must be repaired during your recovery period between workouts. This process is metabolically costly because it takes a lot of energy to repair damaged muscle and synthesize new lean tissue. Research has also documented that weight training can actually stimulate a greater post-exercise metablism-boosting effect than cardio.
4 – Improves your health
Physicians, public health officials and exercise organizations now recommend stregnth training and not just cardio exercise for heart health, improved blood cholesterol profiles, strengthened bone density, increased insulin sensitivity and other health benefits.
5 – Improve muscle tone
With diet alone, you may only end up a smaller version of your old self. With strength training, you can chisel away unwanted fat and add muscle exactly where you want it, in the exact amount you want. Your body is a work of art always in progress and strength training is your tool.
6 – Reverse the aging process
Who doesn’t want to stay looking young? People who don’t maintain their lean body mass through strength training will lose up to 40 percent of their muscle by age 65. Many accept this deterioration as a part of life; most sedentary people experience accelarated pathological aging, not normal aging. When it comes to muscle the old saying “use it or lose it,” it is lterally true! Stregnth training is as close to the fountain of youth as you will ever come!
