Written by Chloe Madeley.
Those that follow me on social media or have ever heard me speak about strength and fitness in the press will know that I’m a staunch advocate not only of regular exercise, but specifically resistance training with intent to improve and maintain muscle mass and strength.
To start this blog as broadly as possible, when you consider all of our everyday lives, there is nobody out there who wouldn’t benefit from being fitter and stronger. If you’re a kid at school, if you’re an adult kicking a football about for fun, if you simply enjoy being outdoors, if you have pets, kids, grandkids, nieces and nephews. If you’re getting older, or you’re pregnant, going through the menopause, or have an old injury or a niggle, if you don’t ‘feel good’ in your own skin (internally and / or externally), 100% of the population will benefit from resistance training.
Maintaining and building muscle will not only improve your longevity but also your quality of life. The latter can be applied to something as trivial as being able to take yourself to the toilet in old age. The former as being able to survive a bad fall (bear in mind that something as indirect as a hip fracture carries a significant increase to mortality risk).
Muscle mass decreases around 3–8% per decade after the age of 30 and is higher after the age of 60. Resistance training will help maintain or delay this loss. Resistance training also plays a key role in bone health by slowing bone loss or even helping to build new bone, which is important for reducing the risk of osteoporosis as we grow older. Something not just men but also menopausal women need to actively tackle.
To venture into more scientific waters, the proven links between resistance training and all-cause, cardiovascular disease, and cancer mortality are undeniable. A recent meta-analysis reviewed the relationship between resistance training and mortality and showed a reduced risk of 15% in all causes, 19% in cardiovascular disease mortality, and 14% in cancer mortality. A maximum risk reduction of 27% was observed at around 60 minutes per week of resistance training.
This systematic review and meta-analysis provide the strongest evidence to date that resistance training is associated with reduced risk of all-cause, cardiovascular disease, and cancer-specific mortality.
What does exercise have to do with gut health?
When it comes to exercise and gut health, we are seeing increasingly strong links between strength and fitness levels and a more varied gut microbiome.
While these results are currently more suggestive than concrete, there are now a number of observational studies linking regular exercise to positive outcomes in the gut microbiome of both animals and humans, from professional athletes to people of different body weights, those with a healthy BMI and those with inflammatory bowel disease.
More research needs to be done on the benefits of exercise and gut health specifically, but it is undeniable that if you want to improve your quality and quantity of life, resistance training is a non-negotiable.
4 tips to get started with strength training
- DO: Book a session with a Personal Trainer before you pick up a weight. The fact of the matter is, lifting weights is a skill, and it's not something you are going to teach yourself to do safely. Just one hour with a PT will go a long way, especially with the big compound lifts like squats and deadlifts, which are technical and dangerous if executed badly.
- DO: Get your protein in. It's the macronutrient responsible for recovery from training and spiking muscle protein synthesis, so make sure to build your daily meals and / or snacks around this macro.
- DON'T: Over train or over do it. When we lift, we create microtears in muscle tissue. These tears need time to heal via rest and protein intake, so don't train the same muscle group or do the same lifting session two days in a row. Always make sure you're getting full rest days from lifting every week (ideally 2-3).
- DON'T: Cut cardio if you enjoy it! Resistance training and cardio are two different modalities of training, and while the benefits of both certainly overlap, these benefits are dosed entirely differently. I like my clients to end a lift with a little cardio, or ask that they separate cardio days with lifting days.
References
Elena Volpi, Reza Nazemi, and Satoshi Fujita. Muscle tissue changes with aging Muscle tissue changes with aging
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Johannes Burtscher, Barbara Strasser, Giuseppe D'Antona, Gregoire P. Millet,and Martin Burtscher. How much resistance exercise is beneficial for healthy aging and longevity? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
