Why Strength Training is Important to Your Workout

As we grow older many of us do between 20 to 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise a few days during the week to keep ourselves healthy. Unfortunately, if that is your only exercise, cardio will not be enough to keep you healthy and strong, as you get older. The new guidelines for physical activity from the American College of Sports and Medicine as well as the American Heart Association recommend most people should add strength training in addition to cardio exercise. If you workout regularly, it is important that you incorporate at least two strength training workouts per week to your routine.

The Benefits of Strength Training
Strength training also known as resistance training has many different workout benefits to those who add it to their training routine. The most beneficial of strength training is that it burns calories and reduces body fat. This allows you to add more muscle tissue, which will in turn greatly increases your ability to burn more calories and therefore reduce your body fat. Additionally, clinical studies have shown that strength training improves the body's bone density, an important need as we lose that density, as we grow older.

How to Add Strength Training to Your Workout
Many of us are a bit intimidated by the array of barbells and dumbbells are our local gyms. Strength training is not necessarily something that involves heavy bodybuilding or lifting a bunch of free weights. Many gyms have various machines and resistance activities to incorporate into a strength-training workout. Just make sure that all these strength-training activities point you into the goal of working out your major muscle groups adequately.

Cardio exercise used to be for many of us our complete workout, but as the research continues to prove to us, strength training is also important. Having both cardio and strength training will be what is needed to keep most people strong, fit, and healthy for years to come.