Blog
Why You Need Strength Training
May
After the age of 35 Everyone Loses about a half-a-pound of Lean Muscle a Year! You can easily lose 5 pounds of muscle going from 35-45. You may still fit into your same jeans, and weigh about the same – but your body composition has changed. 
You’re walking around with less muscle and more body fat. Your arms, shoulders and rear end give it away. So how do you stop or at least slow down the muscle loss?
Exercise! But not just any type of exercise. Some forms of exercise are better than others when it comes to increasing testosterone (TT) and growth hormone (GH), which is what stops and or slows the muscle loss. These are two important hormones needed by both men and women to burn fat and gain lean muscle.
I’m a huge fan of aerobic training and do it myself for overall good health, but the only or one drawback with aerobic exercise – is that it does NOT crank up your TT and GH. Aerobic exercise is a low to moderate intensity. How intense can it be if you can keep doing it for an hour or two? It’s enduring, but it’s not the same thing when it comes to REALLY stressing your body when you workout, so you can jack-up your TT and GH levels.
The more intense the workout – the more testosterone and growth hormone you produce and that’s how you are going to stop the muscle loss! That’s what’s going to stimulate your metabolism! Keep in mind, testosterone and growth hormone stimulate muscle growth and burn fat, so the more TT and GH you can stimulate from your workout – the happier you will be with the results you’ll see in the mirror.
A good aerobic workout, which if done correctly is ONLY low to moderate intensity – will ONLY kick-up your TT and GH so much. However, a good, intense weight training workout or short high intensity interval workout (HIIT) or burst training – with either body weight exercises or weights, will spike your TT and GH so much more.
The takeaway is that you don’t have to kill yourself for an hour in the gym lifting weights. Short, high intense exercise with either weights or body weight exercises, like with My WorkHorse (push-ups, pull-ups, squats, box jumps, etc) will do the same thing. Best of all it can all be done in 5-20 minutes.
So, if you’ve worried that your body composition has changed. A good, 5-20 minute short, high intense interval workout could be what you are looking for. That short, little burst workout should leave you spent and have you praying for the clock to move faster. So, give it a try if you’ve hit a plateau and have struggled or wondered why you haven’t been able to get the results you are looking for. Maybe it’s time to change your workout or at least your workout Intensity!
Remember, it’s about training and dieting smarter for Your Own Personal Goals. I’m not trying to make anyone a muscle-head. I just want you to know, if you want to keep from losing whatever muscle you have you have to stress it more than fatigue it!
Next time we’ll talk more specific about a good training routine and some do’s and don’ts.
