Why everyone (especially women) should do strength training..

While about 50% of people in New Zealand do enough cardio aerobic activity each week, only 20% of us add regular resistance training .

Yet the benefits of strength training (exercise to build the strength of a muscle) are huge, with more evidence coming out all the time showing how vital it is for well-being.

From bone protection, preventing diabetes, and even protecting our heart, the pros for our health are huge - in particular for women, a population who may not even consider it as a part of fitness.

So let's take a dive into the science

Unfortunately, there are a lot of misconceptions about strength and resistance training - the main one for women, is that it will create a bodybuilder muscle bound look.

Originally the domain of weight lifters and those wanting to bulk up, that myth was disproven when athletes who did strength-training realised it helped them hit balls farther, jump higher and run faster, without becoming bigger and less flexible and fast. Since then, we've been realizing there are benefits for health that go far beyond sports.

Women in particular need strength training, especially as they go through menopause and beyond, as its THE only kind of exercise that really makes muscles stronger and faster - allowing us to move.

When we're young, we tend to take for granted the day-to-day parts of life that require strength, such as getting up off the floor, walking up stairs or picking up a baby.

But with ageing, and a sedentary environment where we spend large amounts of time sitting, we gradually become weaker over time - often not even realising this until we injure ourselves, or struggle to do day to day activities such as going up hills or carrying heavy objects.

Then a vicious cycle of injury, less exercise while we recover, and more weakness occurs.

Purposely building muscle can fight back against that process, and significantly reduce age related muscle loss (sarcopenia), which has wide ranging negative effects on our wellbeing .

It’s also one of the very few proven ways to make bones denser, something that is especially important for women after menopause, when the protective effect of oestrogen is lost.

Our bones are constantly remodeling, with our body constantly adding calcium to our bones and taking it away - it's a delicate balance. As we age, we lose more mineral from the bone than we're able to lay down, meaning that over time, bone gets less dense and more brittle and prone to osteoporosis (thinning and weakness of our bones).

Osteoporosis is a common cause of fractures and disability as we age - and it affects mostly women, with 80% of those with osteoporosis being female. Women have smaller, thinner bones than men from the start, and after menopause they lose estrogen, a hormone that protects bones, accelerating that process.

When we work our muscles and bones against resistance (ie lifting something heavy, like a dumbbell, or doing pushups or star jumps) makes bones bear more weight, which stimulates them to grow and become stronger again - counteracting the effects of age and loss of oestrogen.

Its one of the very few ways we can actually make our bones denser.

Strength training also lowers the risk for several diseases that many people aren't aware of

Muscle mass is virtually the only way we can increase our metabolism (without taking drugs), which helps maintain a healthy body weight, and also makes our body more sensitive to insulin. As menopause again slows metabolism and reduces our insulin sensitivity (increasing the risk of type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome, and leading to the central weight gain that's so common as women age), strength training is absolutely vital to counteract this.

Research suggests that strength training can reduce the risk of both type 2 diabetes, and heart disease for women - the main diseases that affect women after menopause.

A 2016 study from Harvard Medical School and the National Institutes of Health, tracked data from nearly 36,000 older women (ranging in age from 47 to 98) over about a decade.

Compared with women who avoided strength training, those who did any amount of strength training were more likely to have a healthier body weight, a healthier diet, and were less likely to smoke.

They also had 30% lower risk of type 2 diabetes, and a 17% lower risk of heart disease than those who did no strength training, even after researchers controlled for age, diet and other physical activity.

Adding cardiovascular exercise (at least 120 minutes/)week) resulted in a type 2 diabetes risk 65% lower than women who didn’t do either.

Ideally we should do a variety of exercise, including cardio, resistance, flexibility and balance. Yet strength training may be the most efficient exercise from a health perspective for people short on time, as with cardio we have to do progressively more and more over time to get the same benefits, due to our fitness increasing. Strength training doesn't seem to have the same limitations.

And you don't have to hit a gym or lift weights to get results - things like resistance bands and body weight exercise (squats, pushups, situps etc) all work as effective resistance exercise, meaning you don't even need any equipment to get going!

Ideally we should aim to do strength training 2-3 days per week, working all our muscle groups each time. This usually means about 8-10 different exercises, with 8-12 repetitions of each one. It really doesn't take much!

The right type and amount will be different for every woman (and man), but even a little bit every day can make a huge difference 😉