Lift Your Way To A Better Future

Most of us appreciate how strength training affects our appearance. It transforms our body composition by building strong, lean muscle, especially when combined with a sensible diet and good protein levels.

But it’s easy to lose our motivation to lift weights if our diet or lifestyle falls off, as often happens in the Summer and during holidays. If we can’t see the results anymore, what’s the point? It’s easy to become demotivated and stop.

Here’s the deal: while strength training is great for your short-term goals, it’s even better for your long-term future. Lifting weights today is like paying into a pension, ensuring you have a functioning body as you age.

Like investing in a pension to give yourself the best chance of happy, stress-free later years, consistent strength training will do the same for your body. Good health and exercise will help you live longer, but lifting weights will give you a much higher quality of life.

So if you’re struggling to get motivated to train, zoom out a little. Your diet might be off track, and you might drink a few extra beers or Aperols after work when it’s warm. But in times when you can’t see your body changing in the dramatic way we sometimes wish they would, keep strength training. It’s an investment.

The question is, what’s the best investment strategy? How often and how much should we lift? Let’s take a look.

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The Science

Any exercise – aerobic or anaerobic – will improve your lung and heart health and give you a better chance of living to a ripe old age. But moderate strength training has explicitly been shown to reduce mortality risk, which is important when considering that our strength naturally declines as we age.

Strength training increases your bone density, improves balance and gives your body a reason to hold onto muscle, making you more robust and injury-proof. It also makes almost every daily physical exertion easier, meaning your energy levels are higher, and you move through the world more easily.

Lifting weights has even been proven to help with brain diseases like dementia and Alzheimer’s. Researchers at the University of Sydney found that six months of strength training can help protect brain areas especially vulnerable to Alzheimer’s disease up to one year later.

How often should I lift?

Like investing – frequency and consistency are key. How often you lift weights depends on your goals, available time, ability, and experience. It’s unlikely that you need to lift for an hour every day – if 30-40 minutes twice a week is all you have time for, you can still get meaningful benefits with the proper training.

Strength training should be a cornerstone of your weekly movement if you want to live a long, healthy and independent life. How often you need to lift varies by individual. Still, for most beginners or intermediate-level people, one good session a week will help you maintain and build a little strength, and two or more should be enough to make progress week to week.

However much you can get in, one thing rings true: regular and consistent strength training will positively change your life.

How much should I lift?

The good news is that you don’t have to be in the gym squatting, deadlifting and bench-pressing every week. You just need to move your muscles against resistance regularly.

You can strength train at home, it doesn’t have to be in the gym with super heavy weights. Lifting heavy can be fun and build incredible strength. But even bodyweight exercises at home will significantly improve your quality of life.

So long as you’re not finding it easy, you should make progress. If it’s a walk in the park every session, you can make it harder in a few different ways. For example:

• If you have more weight available, you can start to increase the weight gradually
• If you don’t have more weight available, then try slowing the movement down, adding reps or decreasing your rest. All three are suitable methods for producing overload, which is required for strength gain.

P.S. You won't get bulky – unless you want to

Lifting weights will not make you bulky by accident, ever. I know people who try extremely hard to add a few lbs of muscle per month to their frame. They lift lots and lift heavy, but most importantly, they eat like horses. It doesn’t happen by accident.

Strength training enables you to do more with what you have through neuromuscular adaptations. This means you become stronger by using more of your existing bundles of muscle fibres through repetition.

You can get stronger without gaining weight, and you can even get stronger whilst losing weight. It’s highly likely that every person you look up to for their athleticism or physique, strength trains – so don’t panic.