Those interested in strength training for health benefits should work on their muscle fitness

Strength Training at Any Age

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You’ve likely heard that exercise can help you live a longer, healthier life. When you hear the word ‘exercise,’ you might think of going for a run or hopping on a bicycle. Or maybe playing soccer with your kids or basketball with your friends after work. But these activities don’t include all the types of movements that are important for your health.

The examples above are endurance exercise. Also called cardiovascular exercise, activities like these increase your breathing and heart rate. They can keep your heart and lungs in good shape and help prevent many chronic diseases. But exercises to maintain flexibility, balance, and strength are also important.

Stretching gives you more freedom of movement and makes daily activities more comfortable. Balance practice helps prevent falls, which become a concern as you get older.

Strength training, also called resistance training or weight training, is particularly important. It brings many benefits. First, it makes your muscles stronger. That can help you keep up the activities you enjoy—at any stage of your life.

It’s not about getting big muscles, explains Dr. Wendy Kohrt, an aging expert at the University of Colorado. In fact, most people who do strength training don’t see much of a change in muscle size.

But at all stages of life, she says, “maintaining muscle mass and muscle function is really important for quality of life.”

Building Up Benefits

Building muscle can do more than make you stronger. Some types of strength training keep your bones healthy, too. Strength training can also improve the way your body processes food to help prevent diabetes and related diseases.

“And like endurance activity, regular strength training is associated with lower risk of cardiovascular disease and other chronic diseases,” says Dr. Joseph Ciccolo, an exercise researcher at Columbia University.

But the main benefit of strength training, as the name suggests, is that it makes your muscle cells stronger. “That benefit is unique to strength training,” says Dr. Roger Fielding, who studies the benefits of exercise at Tufts University.

Experts recommend that children and teens do muscle-strengthening activities at least three days a week. For adults, they encourage strength training for the major muscle groups on two or more days a week.

The benefits of strength training increase as you get older, says Fielding. Maintaining strength is essential for healthy aging.

“Loss of muscle with aging can limit people’s ability to function in their home environment and live independently,” Kohrt says. “Just being able to get up out of a chair or go up and down stairs requires a fair amount of muscle strength.”

In a recent study, Fielding and other researchers tested a three-month weight-lifting program in older adults who already had difficulty walking. At the end of the study, participants who lifted weights improved at tasks like repeatedly bending their knees. Such movements are essential for activities of daily living. In contrast, study participants who only stretched at home did not see similar improvements in strength.

“As we age, I think it’s even more important to consider incorporating some strength training into our physical activity routines,” says Fielding. “We can either slow down the progression of age-related muscle loss or prevent it.”

Mind and Body

Research is starting to show that strength training isn’t just good for physical health—it can be good for mental health.

Ciccolo is studying the effects of strength training on anxiety, depression, and related conditions. His team recently found that strength training could reduce some symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in both women and men.

Endurance exercise may also help people with these problems, says Ciccolo. But some people might be more interested in strength training than aerobic activity. “We want to get people to engage in activities that they find enjoyable,” he says.

How strength training may benefit mental health is still under study. It might help lower certain hormones in the body associated with stress and depression, Ciccolo explains.

In addition, helping people get stronger may boost self-esteem and their sense of control over their lives. “You can feel that you’re being successful and accomplishing something,” he says.

Ciccolo is currently running a study to see if strength training can help relieve symptoms of depression in African American men.

“There’s huge stigma among black men with respect to counseling for mental illness,” he says. “We’re hoping this could be a nontraditional way to get at depression.”

Getting Started

If you want to get started with strengthening exercises, what should you do? Strength training may seem intimidating if you’ve never tried it.

“People naturally learn to walk as part of growing up. But you don’t necessarily learn how to lift weights,” Ciccolo says.

If it’s feasible for you, booking a few sessions with a personal trainer is a good way to get started, says Kohrt. “That can get you introduced to the types of exercises you could do,” she explains.

There are also many low- or no-cost classes available. Look for them at local gyms, recreation centers, senior centers, and community centers.

Like with any new activity, to make strength training stick, “you have to find something that you really like to do,” says Fielding. “Some people will want to exercise in a group, in a community setting. Others will be happy doing all their exercises in their home, by themselves.”

If you’ve never lifted weights before, talk with your health care provider before you start any home-based strength training routine.

Whatever you choose to do, “start slowly and build up very gradually,” says Kohrt. See the Wise Choices box for more tips on getting started safely.

Besides the well-touted (and frequently Instagrammed) benefit of adding tone and definition to your muscles, how does strength training help? Here are just a few of the many ways:

1. Strength Training Makes You Stronger and Fitter

This benefit is the obvious one, but it shouldn’t be overlooked. “Muscle strength is crucial in making it easier to do the things you need to do on a day-to-day basis,” Pire says — especially as we get older and naturally start to lose muscle.

Strength training is also called resistance training because it involves strengthening and toning your muscles by contracting them against a resisting force. According to the Encyclopedia of Behavioral Medicine, there are two types of resistance training:

• Isometric resistance involves contracting your muscles against a nonmoving object, such as against the floor in a pushup.
• Isotonic strength training involves contracting your muscles through a range of motion, as in weight lifting.

2. Strength Training Protects Bone Health and Muscle Mass

At around age 30 we start losing as much as 3 to 5 percent of lean muscle mass per decade thanks to aging, notes Harvard Health Publishing.

According to a study published in October 2017 in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research, just 30 minutes twice a week of high intensity resistance and impact training was shown to improve functional performance, as well as bone density, structure, and strength in postmenopausal women with low bone mass — and it had no negative effects.

Likewise, the HHS physical activity guidelines note that, for everyone, muscle strengthening activities help preserve or increase muscle mass, strength, and power, which are essential for bone, joint, and muscle health as we age.

3. Strength Training Helps Your Body Burn Calories Efficiently

All exercise helps boost your metabolism (the rate your resting body burns calories throughout the day).

With both aerobic activity and strength training, your body continues to burn calories after strength training as it returns to its more restful state (in terms of energy exerted). It’s a process called "excess post-exercise oxygen consumption,” according to the American Council on Exercise.

But when you do strength, weight, or resistance training, your body demands more energy based on how much energy you’re exerting (meaning the tougher you’re working, the more energy is demanded). So you can amplify this effect depending on the amount of energy you put into the workout. That means more calories burned during the workout, and more calories burned after the workout, too, while your body is recovering to a resting state.

4. Strength Training Helps Keep the Weight off for Good 

Because strength training boosts excess post-exercise oxygen consumption, it can also help exercisers boost weight loss more than if you were to just do aerobic exercise alone, Pire says. “[Resistance or strengthening exercise] keeps your metabolism active after exercising, much longer than after an aerobic workout.”

That’s because lean tissue in general is more active tissue. “If you have more muscle mass, you’ll burn more calories — even in your sleep, than if you didn’t have that extra lean body mass,” he adds.

A study published in the journal Obesity in November 2017 found that, compared with dieters who didn’t exercise and those who did only aerobic exercise, dieters who did strength training exercises four times a week for 18 months lost the most fat (about 18 pounds, compared with 10 pounds for nonexercisers and 16 pounds for aerobic exercisers).

You may even be able to further reduce body fat specifically when strength training is combined with reducing calories through diet. People who followed a combined full-body resistance training and diet over the course of four months reduced their fat mass while improving lean muscle mass better than either resistance training or dieting alone, concluded a small study published in January 2018 in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism.

5. Strength Training Helps You Develop Better Body Mechanics

Strength training also benefits your balance, coordination, and posture, according to past research.

One review, published in Aging Clinical and Experimental Research in November 2017, concluded that doing at least one resistance training session per week — performed alone or in a program with multiple different types of workouts — produced up to a 37 percent increase in muscle strength, a 7.5 percent increase in muscle mass, and a 58 percent increase in functional capacity (linked to risk of falls) in frail, elderly adults.

“Balance is dependent on the strength of the muscles that keep you on your feet,” Pire notes. “The stronger those muscles, the better your balance.”

6. Strength Training Can Help With Chronic Disease Management

Studies have documented that strength training can also help ease symptoms in people with many chronic conditions, including neuromuscular disorders, HIV, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and some cancers, among others.

And research published in 2019 in Frontiers in Psychology suggested regular resistance training can also help prevent chronic mobility problems, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and cancer.

7. Strength Training Boosts Energy Levels and Improves Your Mood

Strength training has been found to be a legitimate treatment option (or add-on treatment) to quell symptoms of depression, according to a meta-analysis of 33 clinical trials published in JAMA Psychiatry in June 2018.

“All exercise boosts mood because it increases endorphins,” Pire says. But for strength training, additional research that’s looked at neurochemical and neuromuscular responses to such workouts offers further evidence it has a positive effect on the brain, he adds.

And there's evidence strength training may help you sleep better, too, according to a study published in the January–February 2019 issue of Brazilian Journal of Psychology.

8. Strength Training Has Cardiovascular Health Benefits

Along with aerobic exercise, muscle-strengthening activities helps improve blood pressure and reduce risk of hypertension and heart disease, according to HHS.

RELATED: Strength Training Found to Lower Heart Disease and Diabetes Risk, Independent of How Much Cardio You Do