Benefits of Strength Training and Building Muscle

Why We Should Strength Train

When people go into the gym they see people with huge muscles and lifting big weights or using tons

of equipment and all around seems like everyone knows what they are doing.

Let me tell you that most people are doing what they learned from someone else and were in the same place you were. I for one as a trainer think everyone should learn how to strength train instead of pay X amount of dollars for gym membership to only use the cardio equipment. Trust me, we've all been there.

Learning how to strength train is important because not only do you learn different exercises but you actually get the benefit of doing more to burn more. The most common assumption is that if you do more cardio then you'll work off all the fat or calories and get that dream body. In reality that's just not the case for most. When you learn how to use dumbbells, kettlebells and resistance bands you open a whole world different movements to make harder over time and progress in to then see results.

What I like most about it is that you can turn strength training into other types of training. For example if you are good with dumbbells then perhaps you could start doing more movements with adding some cardio by running and jumping using the weights. Many coaches use yoga and dumbbells to make you sweat harder or add resistance bands to do basic movements and now you have made the easy stuff.. hard.

Another thing I like about strength training is that it helps you grow your muscles. When I started training clients the one of many common phrases I hear was "I don't want to get to bulky" or "I don't want to lift the big weights". It makes me smile after the first few but when I hear it all the time I know exactly how these clients are thinking. yes if it were that easy to just lift heavy and get big muscles then trust me, everyone would do it. Its much harder than you think to grow your muscles as big as those body builders let alone a natural body builder. The point is you can grow your muscles in a few different ways such as making them longer and more flexible, bigger and stronger, or build muscle endurance and still keep your current size. I will write future blogs and make future courses attaining to these topics but for now I'd say to maximize your strength gain you should most defiantly add some weights into your workout plan and over time make it harder than it could be.