Energize Your Life With Strength Training

     Is a decrease in your physical strength and energy getting in the way of enjoying your favorite activities? Regular cardiovascular exercise is a well-known way to preserve stamina and to prevent chronic disease that can slow you down. But an increasing number of older adults practice strength training (using resistance bands, weight machines, body weight, or lifting weights) as an effective health-boosting strategy.

     Men and women of any age can benefit from strength training. Having a chronic medical condition doesn’t mean you can’t do strength exercises. If you’re living with heart disease, arthritis or diabetes, strength training may even help improve your condition.

     Experts point out that many of the changes associated with getting older are actually due to becoming less active with age. Unless you regularly engage in activities to strengthen your muscles, you’ll lose about a half a pound of muscle a year in your 30s and 40s, and that rate can double once you turn 50. As you lose muscle, you lose strength, and that compromises your ability to do even simple things, such as carrying your groceries, getting up from a seated position or gardening. Your metabolism also slows down as you lose muscle, so your body will need fewer calories to maintain your weight, and you’re likely to gain excess body fat, unless you eat less.  Excess fat contributes to a multitude of health problems: heart disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol.

     It doesn’t matter, if you’re 50 years old or 80, studies show that strength training can help to maintain your independence as you get older, improve your quality of life, allow you to do the things you enjoy with less effort, strengthen your bones, improve control of blood sugar, elevate your mood, and reduce your resting blood pressure.

     

Training Abdominal Muscles

I have heard many people ask me if training abdominal muscles everyday is necessary for a strong and flat stomach.  You should treat your abdominal muscles like any other muscle group, which means you shouldn't train them every day. Your abdominals, like all of your other muscle groups, need recovery time between workouts. Not only that, but your abdominals are used for just about any movement you do.

As with any resistance training exercise, you ideally want the last few repetitions to be difficult to complete.  Performed correctly, 10 to 25 repetitions for one to three sets of abdominal exercises provide a more than adequate training stimulus. If you can perform more than 25 repetitions of an abdominal exercise, you are most likely performing the repetitions too rapidly or with improper form.  After awhile, you may also need a more intense abdominal exercise to perform.

You can increase the challenge and intensity of abdominal exercises by using added resistance, moving more slowly, and performing the exercises on a slant board or exercise ball so that your head is at a lower elevation than your legs.  A tougher way would be performing a seated version of an abdominal exercise.  Please ask me for the correct and proper form in performing any abdominal exercise.