The Beautiful Benefits of Training: More Than Just Changing The Way You Look.
Why do you train?
Why do we train? Why do you train? Or, if you don’t train? Why should you train?
If you’re like almost every single person ever, then you might say “to lose weight”, “to tone up”, “to grow muscle”.
You might go for an approach more orientated towards your life and how you actually feel and you might literally say “to feel better about the way I look”, “to feel more confident in my body”, or you might even just say “to improve my life”.
To say one trains to improve their life may be the most vague and the least specific answer, but it’s actually the right answer for everyone. The person trying to lose weight is doing so because they believe that will improve their life. The person trying to feel more confident in their body wants that because it will improve their life.
There are so many more ways than one, for all of us that training will improve our lives. There are countless ways in which training will improve your life. People are always so very focused on how training will change the way they look. I’d say that the vast majority of people who are either in the gym at any one time or those who join the gym do so in order to change the way they look. Because they believe it will improve their life. It usually will.
When there are so many different things that training can do for us to improve our life; including making life last longer, helping us to avoid disease and illness, making us more functional and capable in day to day life, providing us with stress relief, allowing us to eat more of the food we like, plus countless more reasons, why are we always so focused on the way we look?
I think it’s probably because we live in a society where our bodies are more likely to make us sad with how they look than they are to affect us with what they can or can’t physically do. We don’t live in a ‘survival of the fittest’ world anymore. At least we think that we don’t. This means that the average person in the UK is much more likely to be emotionally affected by whether they can attract a partner to marry and raise a family with, pull on a night out or get more likes on social media. They are much less likely to be physically affected by not being able to outrun a sabretooth tiger, not be able to climb a tree or be unable to catch up with and spear an antelope for dinner, for example.
So, it’s not too surprising that our looks are at the forefront of our mind. I wanted to talk today about some of the other reasons and beautiful benefits that training, and also resistance training will improve our lives, not just by growing muscles or making us have less fat on our bodies.
Performance, Strength and Functionality
When you say those three words, people might tend to think I’m talking about athletes. But in the context of this article, the people who benefit from reading this could be quite the opposite. When people get old, this is often when they give up on sport, physical activity and fitness training. I could argue this is when they might need it most. As a person gets older and loses mobility, it’s partly influenced by the ageing process of course, but the rate at which someone will deteriorate is heavily dependent on the exercises they are doing. Does a person lose the ability to perform a squat because their joints are getting old? Or do they lose the ability to squat because they don’t take the joints in their leg through their full range of motion under a load, for example? Yes, joints get old, muscles and tissues lose strength, but since there are elderly people who can perform a good squat and since in more eastern countries we’ll often see elderly individuals capable of holding a better squat than a young and healthy person in the UK, we can definitely inform an idea that the weakening and aging of muscle and joints can be delayed or held at bay by performing these movements. We can back these conclusions further by noticing that these particular aging individuals that hold on to their strength and mobility are not just those that got lucky, but they also just so happen to be the ones that have performed these movements from a younger age and continued to do so as they age. Keeping bones and muscles stronger through aging will help to give people a more pain free life and of course reduce their risk of not only falling for example, but also reduce the likelihood of a fracture or any other injury when they do.
Similarly, when a person becomes disabled through accident or illness, they often think they can’t train at all, and certainly not strength train. Again, dependent on their illness or disability, now might be the time they benefit from such training the most. This year, I have been lucky enough to work with a client who suffered multiple strokes 15 years ago. We have worked not only in an attempt to change how his body looks, but also to develop functionality, since he suffers with weakness on his left side. Following all of the strength and mobility work we have been doing, he is now able to perform better squats to a bench, pick up heavier objects and loads with the left side and has more energy whilst going about daily tasks. For someone fully able, that may seem all good and well, because we take the use of both of our arms for granted, but let’s appreciate for a moment what that could mean for someone with one-sided weakness. This means that he can now clean his flat in a fraction of the time, walk further, trip less often, go about simple tasks like filling up the kettle or picking up a pint of water with the use of both hands, not just one and much more.
It’s all too simple for someone to assume as they age or lose strength following disability that the circumstances are responsible for their losses of strength and functionality. They are, of course but it’s not so easy to admit that maybe the progressing weakness and loss of mobility are as much a result of the things that they have stopped doing as the process of aging and losing ability itself in some circumstances. One thing that is certain is that working on strength and mobility will not only delay the process of depleting ability, bit can also improve a person in this situation from their current age and ability.
Aside from just helping with aging and ability, what are the implications for more “healthy” individuals. I say healthy in the sense that I’m talking about people without aging or disability. But a disabled or aging person could even be healthier, fitter and stronger than a person without these problems. How could training improve the functionality of an obese person? By giving them more energy, reducing the stress and pain through their joints, improving their balance, making it easier to get out of chairs even. Even for someone very healthy and fully able, being fitter and stronger can only improve their life through functionality. What could being able to run and/or run for longer, walk faster, move around with more ease and lift objects at work without fear of injury do for their life? How amazing are such benefits and the potential of them to literally anyone ever?
Safety and Life Longevity
This one could almost be a subtitle point or an extension of the performance, strength and functionality paragraph. However, it’s got a different nature to it. Not just in terms of improving one’s potential at completing day to day tasks, but also with the implication of protection. One of my favourite quotes on this comes from one of my fitness heroes, Bret Contreras, who once said “lifting weights isn’t dangerous. Try being weak. Being weak is dangerous”. This couldn’t be more true.
Although we don’t live in a ‘survival of the fittest’ world and these things don’t happen often within our society, life is full of dangers. We just always think “that won’t happen to me” because of probability. The reality is that bad things can happen to anyone, and when it happens to you, your safety and survival as well as that of those around you could be entirely dependent on how physically strong and able you are. Regardless of if you are disabled, old or limited in your ability, your chances are only increased by being a better version of yourself. I’m not saying that if you get mugged in an alley way, you’re going to fight off a gang armed with knives just because you’ve been going to the gym for a few months. But, again, your chances of coming out better off if you are attacked or put in danger out of your control are only improved with strength and ability. You are only going to be better off if you have to lift a heavy object off of yourself, a loved one or even a stranger if you are stronger and more capable. You are only going to be better off if you ever need swim or climb out of a tricky situation.
It’s also a fact that those who partake in resistance training, create stronger muscles and more dense bones, tend to live longer and experience less pain, and a better quality of life in their old age.
This isn’t about scaring you into thinking that you’re going to die a horrible death in an accident or viscous attack if you don’t start going to the gym. It’s also not about saying you’ll die early if you don’t resistance train. But it is about acknowledging that you live in an unforgiving world that doesn’t owe you a thing. It’s about accepting that in the event that anything terrible ever does happen, those who survive better off either got very lucky or they were physically able enough to get through it. What a beautiful benefit that is.
Enjoying Food
Let’s talk about something more fun right now. Like being able to eat burgers, pizza and chocolate free of guilt and consequences. Have you ever looked at someone in great shape, six pack, shredded arms, the lot and just watched them devour a big mac and fries, milkshake and doughnut and thought “how come they can eat like that and look like that but I can’t?”. Overwhelmed with either jealousy of their super human ability to be unaffected by the physics of calories or the belief that your body just makes more fat than theirs does and the thought that you’re broken, this might have been a very upsetting experience. Let’s talk about that.
First and foremost, it’s very likely that this person didn’t live off of big macs and milkshakes. It’s likely that they eat reasonably well at home and for a large percentage of their other meals. However, they are also a lot more able to get away with eating higher calories foods that you might consider to be less healthy and there are a few reasons why…
For one, they’re likely to be fitter and stronger. Think of exercise and calorie burning a bit like this; If you’re fitter and stronger, you’ll burn more calories doing the same exercise compared to if you aren’t as strong and fit. If you do 20 minutes of running, but you’re fitter and can run faster than before then you’ll burn more calories in that same 20 minutes. If you do 3 sets of 5 deadlifts but you are stronger and can lift 20kg heavier, you’ll burn more calories in the same number of reps won’t you? When you compare strength training to cardio, strength training also has a greater EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption) effect. This means that when training for strength you could be burning more calories for multiple days after your session is finished. Something that your body doesn’t really experience following cardio.
Furthermore, they might also burn more calories when they’re doing absolutely nothing. That’s right. Strength training creates stronger and bigger muscles. Stronger and bigger muscles require more calories to just exist in that state on your body. This means that in 6 months’ time, if you have bigger and stronger muscles, you’ll naturally burn more calories even when you’re sleeping.
Not only does the exercise itself burn more calories, but also the results and outcomes of doing this kind of exercise also burns yet more calories. There are many implications and there is a lot of potential in this, one of my favourite benefits being that this means you could, should you want to, be able to eat more food, more calorie dense food, and therefore more of the foods you enjoy, whilst being fitter, leaner, healthier and not feeling bad about eating these foods. This is a beautiful benefit because you can enjoy what you enjoy more and not have to experience detriment to your physique and health or the fear of such.
Final words
I really hope this article today has given you some insight into the beautiful benefits of resistance training, strength training and general fitness aside from just looking different and changing your appearance. Ultimately, training should be about making us feel better or giving us a better life. I know that there is so much more to the good life than just looking leaner or being slimmer. But when this spends so much time at the forefront of people’s minds, it could be very easy for them to forget these other amazing benefits.
Remember that looking leaner or being slimmer will only make you happy if it actually improves your life. For most people, it will. For some people it won’t. Maybe because when they get there, and it was just a weight number or a body fat percentage but they still haven’t improved the quality of what actually happens in their life. That whole goal can suddenly not be as rewarding as they always thought it would be. What if someone was so strict with food and calories that they never enjoy their food. What if someone focused so much on eating less and not on their training in order to change their body that they ended up becoming weak and unhealthy? This is why it’s so important to be familiar with some of these other benefits to training. There are many more to identify too! Some of them might be very personal and individual to you.
If you have any questions on what you’ve read about today or about how to get started with this type of training, then I’d love to hear from you and help you. Email me at coaching@brookadnitt.com
Happy training.
Brook
