2. Strength training
Strength training or resistance exercises are designed to strengthen your muscles and your joints and to tip your lean body mass ratio toward more muscle. It makes your body leaner, stronger and more beautiful, no matter what your age or what your condition to begin with.
Body composition
The body is made up of two different kinds of tissue – body fat (adipose tissue) and lean body mass. Everything that is not fat is your lean body mass. It includes all the bones and tissues built of proteins, especially muscles.
Resistance training builds lean body mass which is a main marker of biological age. It also encourages the production of growth hormone and other anabolic youth-related hormones. Growth hormone levels are high when you are young. At the moment one of the biggest fads is growth hormone injections. It is a therapy that is both expensive and unproven. Also, growth hormone injections can lead to disturbances in insulin resistance and blood glucose levels, both of which accelerate degeneration. It is much better to buy yourself a couple of dumbbells and do a simple workout routine for half an hour four times a week and then shove them under the bed out of sight.
Many women are afraid of the idea of building muscle assuming it will make them bigger. In fact the opposite is true. When you work with muscles in a concentrated way through resistance training, your muscles don’t become bigger, they become more dense. Your body takes on a better curvy shape. You may actually gain weight as muscle is dense and compact, compared to fat which is fluffy and bulging. You will be surprised when your clothes become looser than before.
MUSCLE IS HEALTH
People with a high percentage of muscle have a much higher metabolism. They burn more calories and don’t put on weight so easily, sometimes no matter how much they eat. Many women find themselves in the opposite state, often due to crash dieting. With each crash diet you lose considerable muscle mass. Although, they may be thin, they may be technically obese because their ratio of fat to lean body mass is much too high. They have far too high a percentage of fat. This weakens them and makes them haggard. Often then, they continue to lower their caloric intake to prevent themselves from putting on weight. Some are so serious about losing weight that they live on a diet of 1000 calories or less a day. Such a diet cannot supply the nutrients you need for adequate protection from degeneration. So these people, whose bodies by now are undergoing degeneration and accelerated aging, grow less vital and more haggard as the years pass, finding it harder and harder to lose weight and easier and easier to gain it, no matter how little they eat.
Get lean, Get muscle
Fat in the body – adipose tissue – is highly inactive. Except for a small amount to cushion our organs and to offer some stored energy, we don’t need it. It is dead weight we carry and offers no vitality.
Muscle, on the other hand, is highly alive and vital. It is in your muscle cells that energy is converted from the foods you eat to be burnt as fuel. Within each muscle cell is the mitochondria which converts all the fat and carbohydrates we eat into ATP, your body’s currency of energy. The more mitochondria you have the more vitality you experience.
Benefits of more muscle
●Good metabolism – burns body fat and improves body composition
●Improves ability to use oxygen and good for cardiovascular health
●Protects body from insulin resistance- Syndrome X – the recently discovered collection of abnormalities associated with both early aging and the onset of degenerative diseases.
●Guards against cholesterol problems, so you maintain a high level of the beneficial HDL cholesterol.
Between young adulthood and middle age, we lose about 3 kg of lean body mass- muscle – each ten years of our life. This loss is accelerated after the age of 45. This loss, however, is not inevitable as widely believed. It is not normal part of aging, but as the result of disuse.
