Most of us don’t do enough strength training to realize that It can bring health benefits. The American College of Sports Medicine has declared New guidelines on strength training that offers more real advice than you’ll hear about strength training anywhere else. In addition to outlining how much training we need, the new guidelines also come with a few surprises, in the form of debunking many of the long-held “rules” of strength training. Among them: training to failure isn’t necessary, and unstable surfaces aren’t necessary to improve your balance.
I see fitness professionals celebrating these new ACSM guidelines as a major improvement over previous advice. Certainly the new version becomes more specific about how to achieve different training benefits (such as strength versus muscle size), but it also tells us how not To further consider the details. I’ll give the highlights below, and then you can read on Press release And Complete list of guides.
Why strength training is important
If you are interested in fitness for its own sake, you should know it Both cardio and strength training are important-You can’t just do one and ignore the other. But even if you’re only interested in the health benefits, strength training is crucial.
I have written about this before Benefits of gaining muscle massThese include improvements in your metabolism, overall health and ability to be active and independent as you age. The ACSM writes in its paper that resistance training (its preferred term for what I call strength training) has positive effects on health outcomes, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, depression and sleep quality.
How much strength training to plan for
We should all do some strength training, as all the exercise guides tell us. (In particular, Here are the most recent US guidelines(which recommends that we all strength train twice a week.) The ACSM agrees with at least two times per week, per muscle group. That means you can do a full-body workout twice a week, or split your workouts so that each muscle gets at least two days of work.
Six Things Not to Overthink When Strength Training
I think some of the most interesting things in the new ACSM guidelines are where it tells us not to worry According to the evidence the authors reviewed, there is a lot of stuff that isn’t conclusively supported, and you can safely stop worrying about it:
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Training “to failure” is not necessary. You don’t need to continue exercising until you physically can. you should Work very hard, but it’s important not to hit the point of failure.
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Instability training is no better for balance. You don’t need to stand on an unstable surface to train your balance; Balance gets better as people get stronger, whether they use stable or unstable surfaces for training.
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Time is not important in stress. Some gym bros will tell you that the most important thing is how long your muscles spend exercising, and therefore slower reps are better than faster ones. An ACSM review found no benefit of increasing time under tension for strength or muscle growth.
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Beginner/intermediate/advanced routines are not required. The same basic advice applies to everyone, ACSM concludes. It doesn’t mean you have Like an advanced lifter you trained as a beginner, but it also means you can keep doing what works for you as long as it works.
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Any equipment you use to strength train is fine. Gym workouts, home workouts, resistance bands, bodyweight exercises – anything that gives you a good strength workout is good. You should make sure you can do challenging sets of exercises with whatever you choose, but there’s no obvious reason to prefer barbells over resistance bands at home.
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Progressive overload is not always necessary. This will come as a shock to many fitness buffs! Gradually increasing the difficulty of your workouts is one way to get stronger, but it’s not always necessary to get basic health benefits. That said, if you start with too much Starting with light or easy exercises, you’ll need to increase the difficulty to make sure you’re training hard enough.
Ultimately, the guide emphasizes that doing something is better than nothing, and that finding something you can stick with is more important than optimizing the details of your routine. Only 30% of us do any strength training twice a week, and that number can be as low as 10% for older people.
What do you think so far?
According to the ACSM, how to meet your strength training goals
Here’s a basic breakdown of what ACSM gives for different goals:
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for strengthLift heavy loads (at least 80% of your one-rep max) for at least 2 to 3 sets per exercise.
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For muscle gain (hypertrophy), aim for 10 sets of strength exercises per muscle group, per week.
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to power (explosiveness), use loads that are between 30% and 70% of your one-rep max, and try to move the weight as quickly as possible during the concentric (lifting) portion of the exercise.
If you’ve never thought about these things separately, let me break them down:
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Power Perhaps the easiest to ignore, but as exercise scientist Jason Sawyer Medical News Today saidIt’s the one thing that older adults lose the fastest and rarely train. Strength refers to how quickly, or how explosively, you can contract a muscle. Box jumps are an exercise that works on the strength in your legs; Another strength exercise for the legs is to raise the barbell squat as quickly as possible.
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strength It’s pretty much what it sounds like – the ability to handle heavy weights or apply a lot of force. The stronger you are, the easier it will be to carry a bag of baby or dog food or cement (to put it in the real world).
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Hypertrophy Refers to building muscle. We all lose muscle as we age, so some amount of hypertrophy training is helpful to counteract that trend. Muscle tissue is good for our body, including our metabolism, as I told you before.
You can work on all three of these areas using a variety of exercises and weights, but you may find it easiest to focus on one of them at a time.
