When you think of exercise, do you focus on breaking a sweat? Pounding the pavement? Swimming laps or heading out on a bike?
If you’re 30 or older, it’s time for a change.
While you shouldn’t ditch your cardio routine altogether, it’s more important than ever to add strength training to your exercise regimen.
In fact, just 30-60 minutes each week can add benefits — and even increase your life expectancy by 10-17%.
Dr. Jared Tadje has advanced training in sports medicine and a personal passion for physical activity. Whether he’s working with professional athletes or people who want to age well, Dr. Tadje strives to help his patients at Tadje Orthopaedics keep their bodies in peak condition.
When people want to do one thing to improve their overall health and wellness, Dr. Tadje often recommends strength training. And these exercises become even more important once you reach 30.
In this blog, Dr. Tadje shares five key benefits of incorporating strength training into your wellness strategy.
It’s probably fairly obvious that strength training helps build muscle.
While this may not seem like a big deal, the average person starts losing approximately 1% of their muscle mass each year after turning 30.
And don’t worry: You don’t need an expensive gym membership, and you won’t bulk up like a professional bodybuilder.
Instead, you can do exercises that use your own body weight and gravity — like yoga, Pilates, pushups, or squats — or use resistance bands, free weights, or weight machines.
Dr. Tadje can offer personal recommendations based on your overall health and fitness level to help get you started.
People often focus on muscle alone when strength training comes up, but these exercises are also essential for healthy bone development.
In addition to losing muscle mass after passing age 30, you also start to lose bone density, strength, and structure — especially if you were born female.
But strength training activities trigger the bone-building process, which helps maintain strong, healthy bones.
If you’ve been looking for the best way to slim down and maintain your weight, nothing beats strength training.
These exercises boost your metabolism in a variety of ways. First, building muscle improves your metabolic rate, meaning you can burn more calories when resting. But that’s not all.
Strength training also increases your metabolic rate for up to 72 hours. More simply put: You continue burning calories for days after working out.
And if that isn’t enough, strength training activities even decrease abdominal fat — a substance directly linked to chronic diseases, like Type 2 diabetes, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, heart disease, and certain cancers.
Balance, coordination, and posture usually don’t top a person’s list of health concerns.
But advancing age can add up to lost strength, decreased range of motion, and reduced motility in soft tissue. These changes increase the chances of falling, and falls lead to injury and disability.
Incorporating strength training into your fitness regimen at least once each week can increase body mechanics by 58%. Why? Because the stronger your muscles, the better your balance. And the better your body mechanics, the lower your risk of injury.
The good news is that many forms of strength training can help improve your body mechanics and reduce your risk of falls, from weight training and resistance bands to bodyweight exercises and tai chi.
Last but not least, strength training is a boon for your emotional, mental, and cognitive health.
Moving your body is always beneficial, but strength training releases mood-boosting endorphins that promote positivity.
People who participate in strength training exercises also experience significant improvement in their cognitive function, including memory, processing speed, and executive function.
Experts believe these benefits occur because of the neuroprotective effects of these specific activities, like reduced inflammation, increased blood flow, and more brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) — a growth factor associated with learning and memory.
This is just the tip of the iceberg with the benefits associated with strength training, but they also add up to an increased quality of life, especially when aging.
To learn more about Dr. Tadje and the services he offers at his leading orthopaedics practice, contact Tadje Orthopaedics in Meridian, Idaho, today.
