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Resistance Training: what is it?
- Olly
Resistance Training: what is it? What are the benefits?
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What can resistance training do for you?
Resistance training is a big term – it covers everything from weightlifting to band pull-aparts. It should be part of everyone’s training and boasts a variety of amazing health and fitness benefits.
With all these potential benefits, today we’re going to define resistance training, talk you through the key benefits, and provide some examples you can use. Stick with us if you’re intrigued by strength, fitness, and improving your health into the future!
Definition
One problem we see in health and fitness is that resistance training and “weight training” are mixed up. They’re not the same thing – they’re two different terms in the whole landscape of health and fitness training methods. Weight training is a type of resistance training, but it isn’t the only kind.
Weight training is the most popular kind, but resistance training is anything that requires you to work against external resistance. This could be working with a weighted club for your golf swing to throwing med-balls. Clearly, it’s not just working with a barbell or weight machine!
The idea behind resistance training is a simple, ancient one: pick a movement or group of muscles you want to strengthen and make that movement more difficult. This is a type of training that leads the way for every athlete and every fitness enthusiast – it’s at the heart of getting better: challenge yourself and you’ll get stronger!
Benefits
So why should you care about resistance training?
Overloading your muscles with resistance is the fastest and most-effective way to get bigger and stronger! This is why weight training and other resistance exercise is so popular – it’s why athletes and fitness enthusiasts alike spend time training in gyms or on fields. Muscle and strength are common goals for simply looking and performing better.
Staying Healthy: Improves Bone and Joint Strength
If you feel like staying healthy and active as you age, resistance training is one of the best ways of achieving this. The bones get stronger when you add resistance, too – the stress of exercise improves their density, which is important for keeping bones strong as you age. This is key for avoiding fractures and other debilitating injuries!
Between the muscles and the bones, you have the tendons. They’re underrated, but they store a lot of energy during exercise and they’re key for moving well and keeping your joints healthy. Resistance training – especially the ‘lowering’ portion – is essential for healthy tendons. It keeps them stiff and strong, protecting your joints and keeping your mobile as you age.
Resistance Improves Coordination and Stability
The benefit of resistance training with compound exercises like the squat and press also include developing the core, balance, and stability.
These aren’t as glamorous as big guns, but they’re just as important. Learning to coordinate your joints effectively while loaded is a great way of improving how you move. This is key for keeping your joints healthy as you age, but it also helps with everyday life and health.
Balance and stability are underrated. For example, combining strength training with jumping movements directly protects the knee and hip from pain and injury – common problems for every active adult!
The control of muscles and joints also directly plays into your risk of lower-back pain. With 80% of adults being debilitated by back pain, it’s key to protect yourself. Training the strength of the back muscles and learning to control them is a key way of reducing risk.
We see the same thing in the shoulders where 43% of people deal with shoulder pain – many of which are the result of weakness, imbalance, tightness, or poor movement. Strength and full-range resistance training are key to building effective mobility and coordination – which means less injuries, as well as looking and performing better!
Can Resistance Training Improve your Metabolism?
More muscle doesn’t just mean more strength – it means a healthier, regular metabolism. If you’re struggling to lose weight, it could be related to a lack of muscle. Muscles require lots of energy, from food, to build and maintain.
I like to look at resistance training as a form of investment in your long-term health and physique. It doesn’t burn as many calories as cardio in the short-term, but you burn more calories when you’re at rest after resistance-training and the muscle that it builds improves your resting metabolism for years to come!
This is important for metabolic problems like diabetes, too – resistance training and muscle mass fight against insulin resistance. They provide you with improved mood and regulate the physical and psychological processes that put you at risk of metabolic syndromes.
Resistance Training Examples
Weight training is the most common kind of resistance training. It’s why the two are often confused. Free weights are the most advanced and most-effective for overloading resistance.
However, weight machines and cables are a great way of targeting specific muscles, building up strength and stability in at-risk joints, or just getting your foot in the door with resistance training. They’re a great way of adding resistance if you’re coming back from an injury or you’re at greater risk (such as advanced age or a total novice).
Resistance bands and elastic resistance are also great for stability and certain types of explosive movement. They’re resistance but not weight, and they provide a totally different type of training. You’ll get a lot of benefit from bands for the upper back and scapula: a notoriously tricky area in the upper back that requires huge amounts of control and stability.
There are too many weighted implements to even count. These range from the sport-specific (such as the heavy discus or club) to the general (like the med-ball). These are great resistance training tools for power, balance, and stability exercises that you might have missed out on.
Med-balls are the best example of this – they provide a totally different challenge to the power you can produce and how you move.
These are movement-quality based exercises where you’re not dealing with huge weights, and the resistance is about how you move, rather than how much force you use. There are some great benefits for your strength, health, power, and even movements like a golf swing.
Final Thoughts: Resistance Training isn’t Everything
External resistance is great, and we’ve got nothing but good things to say about it, but it’s not the only important style of training.
Internal resistance exercises like gymnastic movements and core work aren’t about resistance, they use leverage to challenge you. These make up a big part of training for health and strength. This is just one example of why you need more than resistance training – cardio is another.
Putting together a well-balanced training program is about using the right tools for the job. Resistance training is a great tool and you should be using it to your advantage – it has a wide variety of benefits to health, fitness, performance, and especially the aging process.
At Action-Reaction Training, we put these parts together to cover all the most important benefits. It’s about using strength and resistance training to get the most out of the time you have to train – our coaching is about balancing these exercises to get the most from your body and mind.
Olly
If you’ve still got some unanswered questions or fears about signing up to the ART 12 week body transformation programme then visit our FAQ page were we’ve hopefully covered and addressed all your concerns.
Alternatively drop me an email at olly@action-reaction-training.com.
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Would you like to learn effective resistance training for just £24?
Start my 4 week trial today for just £24 with no onward commitment. I’ll give you your money back if you don’t see or feel a change during the trial.
For more details or to sign up for the trial today click buy now link below…
If you have any questions about the plan then drop me an email, I will always respond to you: olly@action-reaction-training.com
Alternatively visit the WEBSITE for more details.
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