The Best Exercise Program is Based on Strength Training

In this episode, Rick and Matt discuss why strength training is the basis for the best exercise program. There are an overwhelming variety of exercise programs to choose from out there and plenty of different opinions.

Many fitness businesses that push that they have the latest and greatest workout trends usually have something to gain financially. Fitness fads and gimmicks produce temporary and quick results, but many are just not sustainable. For example, with the high-intensity training options offered in many gyms, you can push too hard and cause injuries. For many people in the over 40-70 age group, an injury could cause them to never workout again. High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is definitely NOT the ideal workout for the majority of people!

This explains why there is a high number of people who don’t stick around in the gym that long, especially the de-conditioned and older age segments. Either they’re troubled with specific injuries from daily activities or after trying gym routines, or they aren’t that motivated at all. This leads to high turnover rates, lower retention, and lower profitability for your business.

Fortunately, real hard data and the latest science are coming in to back up Alloy claim: strength training is THE most important activity you can do to increase your overall health and fitness. It trumps all the other popular exercise programs you’ve ever known.

What is Strength Training?

Strength training is resistance exercise and an anaerobic exercise that increases muscle strength by making muscles work against a weight or force. Different types of strength training include using free weights, weight machines, resistance bands, and using your own body weight.

Why Is Strength Training Important?

A few ways strength training can benefit you include:

Increase Metabolism – Once you increase your muscle mass, it raises your metabolism. It allows you to burn more calories sitting at rest than you would if you were carrying more fat and less muscle.
Improve Quality Of Life – Strength training helps you to perform your daily activities and improve your health. Many times, exercise can help prevent high blood pressure and diabetes by reducing fat.
Prevent Injuries and Improve Recovery – Strength training can also protect your joints from injury. Building muscle also can contribute to better balance and may reduce your risk of falls. This can help you maintain independence as you age.
Improve Mental Health – Strength training can help with mental health by increasing the chemicals your body releases to ease depression and anxiety. It can also raise self-esteem, cognitive function and overall well-being.
Increase Life Expectancy – There is a high correlation between anaerobic threshold and increasing lifespan. Researchers found that just 30 to 60 minutes a week of muscle-strengthening, or “resistance,” exercise increased life expectancy by 10 to 17 percent.

“Strength training is the key component of overall health and fitness for everyone to

reduce body fat, increase lean muscle mass, increase bone density, and burn calories more efficiently.”

Mayo Clinic

At Alloy, we incorporate smart programming into your full-body workout by using undulating periodization. It is a type of training where volume and intensity go up and down, either weekly or daily, within the training period. This way we can to incorporate lots of different rep ranges into someone’s programs for strength and muscular endurance. This program is excellent for fat loss or sports performance goals.

The more lean tissue you add and muscle mass, it will be easier to lose weight. Right. So we use our body composition tool to regularly measure muscle mass, lean tissue, and fat. Weight on the scale is important to a certain degree, but when you look at muscle vs fat weight, muscle can weigh more than fat but be much smaller in mass than fat. So you really don’t want to look at body weight as your overall measure of fat loss, but on your actual body composition..

At Alloy, we also advocate more movement outside the gym as well as the basic strength training workout. We also provide an aerobic component, but you don’t have to get out there and do hours of cardio to reap the benefits. For one example, we will do a three to five minute metabolic finisher at the end of the workout to push your heart rate higher.

Tune in to this episode as Rick and Matt discuss what real strength training looks like and what it does to your body.