If I told you doing just two months of something would reverse two decades muscle loss, would you do it? Well, that's what a consistent weight-training program can do for you. In addition to that, weight training may increase your metabolism and decrease fat. Sounds too good to be true? Well, here are the facts.

It is a well-known fact that there is a rapid decline in muscle mass in sedentary individuals starting at about age 50. This loss of muscle mass, also termed sarcopenia, accounts for the decreases in basal metabolic rate (BMR), muscle strength and activity levels seen in couch potatoes as they age. As our BMR declines, our energy requirements also decline. Decreased energy requirements means we need fewer calories to sustain ourselves. Most people, however, don't reduce their caloric intake and their body fat content gradually increases each year. Increased body fatness and the accompanying increase in abdominal obesity promote many serious disease states.
We now know that this decline in muscle mass can be totally prevented and even reversed by simply incorporating resistance exercise training into our lifestyles.

The difference between aerobics and strength training
Although both aerobic and strength training are necessary for overall fitness, muscle and strength loss can only be stopped and reversed with resistance exercise. As our muscle mass increases our strength also increases. Improvement in strength clearly has important implications for our health and the quality of our lives. Increased muscle mass and strength are the first steps toward reversing the syndrome of physical frailty now seen in all age groups in our society. Balance and coordination also improved with weight lifting reducing our chance of falling-falls, by the way, are a major source of injury, fractures and debilitation leading to death for people as they age. Strength training also helps maintain and even increase bone density in both women and men of all ages, further reducing their risks for fractures.

Aerobic exercise and weight-bearing physical activities like walking and running are important in maintaining overall health as well as healthy bones, but they do little to preserve or increase bone density. High-intensity progressive strength training is the only type of exercise that will prevent and actually treat osteoporosis and other degenerative bone diseases in both men and women. Progressive resistance training not only helps premenopausal women achieve the highest peak bone mass possible, it also helps maintain and even increase bone density in postmenopausal women. This is of vital importance since no other form of therapy, including drugs, hormone replacement therapy and calcium supplementation, can replace the bone women lose after menopause-only resistance training will do it!

A recent symposium on resistance training for health and disease has addressed the scientific evidence for the importance of strength training in the prevention and rehabilitation of many chronic disease problems, such as physical dysfunction, obesity/metabolism, weight control, osteoporosis, low back pain and disability.

The following table, by Pollock and Vincent, from The President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports Research Digest, really helps us better understand the differences in aerobic (cardio) training and resistance training.

Aerobic exercise and resistance training also work hand-in-hand to prevent, reduce, or even reverse heart disease by preventing or controlling diabetes, hyperlipidemia and hypertension. Aerobic exercise does a good job at lowering systolic blood pressures, while both aerobic and resistance exercise help reduce diastolic blood pressures. Both forms of exercise also strengthen the heart muscle.

One final reason I have become a great believer in the value of resistance training is because, traditionally doctors (including myself) have discouraged people with heart disease from engaging in strength training with weights or exercise machines because they believed this would put dangerous stress on their hearts. Recently, however, an expert panel of scientists, organized by the American Heart Association, has finally put to rest this age-old myth. This committee now advises physicians to actually start recommending weight lifting to individuals with heart disease, including even some people with recent heart attacks, as long as they are closely monitored and supervised by experienced health professionals.

People with healthy hearts (no matter what their age or gender) and most with unhealthy hearts can and should be encouraged to start using resistance training along with their aerobic training as an important part of their heart-disease prevention and/or treatment program-in other words, just about everybody should lift weights!