Five Benefits to Pumping Iron

As a strength and conditioning coach, I meet many women who shy away from lifting moderate to heavy weights because of their fears that they will get too bulky, or they do not feel they can lose weight with resistance training.  While cardiovascular training does typically burn more calories per session, resistance training—using moderate to heavy loads—not only burns calories with each session, but it also gives the body many benefits that increase the quality of those calories burned in the long-term.

Here are the five top benefits to adding some iron (or resistance bands!) to those workouts:

1. Improve your body composition.

When we lift moderate or heavy loads, we cause microtears in the muscles that are being worked. While this sounds bad, it actually allows the muscles to increase in size while we are in recovery-mode. As we increase the size of our muscles, we can burn more fat while at rest or during our next workout, and that is how we reduce body fat and build lean mass.

This is usually a turn-off for those that see scale weight as their only marker for weight-loss success. Muscle is 70% water and weighs much more than fat, so while we can improve the way we look and the way our clothes fit, the scale might not budge—and can even go up a bit—but a dense body is a healthy body.

I suggest taking circumference measurements, because while muscle can be heavier, it can also look leaner than fat, so you might lose inches before the scale moves.

2. Improve your heart health.

While cardio training is the gold standard for improving heart health, resistance training can lower blood pressure and decrease visceral fat, which is the not-so-healthy fat that can build around vital organs, like the heart.  The key to resistance training’s special blood pressure powers is that it spikes the body’s blood pressure during training, forcing the heart to work hard to pump blood during workouts. This builds up the heart’s ventricular walls, particularly the left ventricle, and this makes the heart pump more blood with each beat, so it can work less at rest but still pump the same amount of blood.

3. Improve your bone density.

One of the biggest benefits of resistance training, especially for women, is that it promotes the formation of new osseous tissue, which is the fancy term for bone. When we put moderate to heavy loads on our bodies, like doing squats with dumbbells versus bodyweight squats, the stress helps our bodies stimulate the release of calcium, which promotes the formation of bone tissue through the same microtears like muscle. Those microtears get repaired with new bone tissue to make stronger bones that will be able to take the pressure of the weight better.

Women are at an increased risk of osteopenia and osteoporosis later in life, but studies have shown the need to start resistance training earlier to mitigate the risk.

4. Increase your Resting Metabolic Rate.

The resting metabolic rate is the amount of calories our bodies expend at rest. As stated previously, resistance training can improve your body composition by swapping out fat tissue with lean muscle tissue. The more muscle tissue on our bodies, the more calories we burn throughout the day. Muscle tissue is more active than fat tissue, so it burns more calories; therefore, we need more energy to satiate muscle tissue, even at rest, which means we need more calories each day to stay alert and energized.

5. Improve functional posture, walking ability, and reduce chronic pain.

The more we exercise with weights, the better our bodies are at maintaining a proper posture because the muscles are trained to stay in that posture for prolonged periods of time (think teleworking for 8 hours). We have muscle fibers that must be trained to withstand long periods of standing, sitting, and walking, and we have muscle fibers that need to be trained to react quickly in the correct ways, like picking up our kids or groceries, so we reduce the risk of injury. The best way to train these muscles is to exercise. The more we exercise, the better the chances that our cores will keep us upright, our shoulders stay back, and our legs from butt to toes can lift, bend, walk, and run when we need to.

These five points merely scratch the surface of the benefits to a good resistance training routine. So, if you have some dumbbells collecting dust in the garage or under the couch, consider putting them in your hands the next time you do some squats! If you are a complete beginner to resistance training, make sure you seek some professional help or advice before going too heavy. Next month, I will touch on some common myths behind resistance training and shed more light on whether these are backed by science or need to be left in the past!

Happy (and safe) lifting!