To keep yourself looking young and fighting off signs of aging, it’s a fantastic idea to add some form of resistance training to your exercise goals.
Resistance training stresses your muscles to help them develop. It can increase your resting metabolic rate, decrease body fat, and enhance muscle tone — as well as improve your balance and motor coordination.
Resistance training is much more important as you age because it helps combat loss of muscle mass and strength.
Incorporating resistance training into your exercise program — even just twice a week — greatly improves your stability and range of motion. This can help keep you safe in your everyday activities and make you less prone to falls and other injuries that plague older adults.
For best results, select from a variety of resistance training workouts. You can use machines, free weights, bands or group fitness classes to work in your resistance training. Try these different ideas at home or at the gym:
Workout Using Machines
The machines at your gym (or in your home, if you have them) are great tools for resistance training. An advantage of using a machine is that it can help you focus on the efforts of your movement instead of on the mechanics of the exercise.
Use Free Weights or Resistance Bands
Free weights also offer an effective resistance training workout. Whether you use dumbbells or barbells, you can do a variety of resistance exercises for all your muscle groups.
Whether you’re a beginner or an expert, resistance bands are for you. They are available in a variety of resistances, such as light, medium and heavy, and you can further adjust the strength of your resistance-band workouts by giving the band more or less slack. You can even use multiple bands at once to increase the challenge.
Another advantage? You can take resistance bands with you anywhere you go — especially if you travel a lot.
Take A Group Fitness Class
It’s easy to get off track with your fitness goals if you are not motivated or whenever you are bored with your workouts. Don’t give up, though!
Instead of quitting, think about taking a group fitness class such as Boot Camp, TRX suspension training or Pilates. A Pilates workout helps build the muscles of your body. It helps build strength, flexibility, coordination, stability and good posture.
Alternate Days to Aid Muscle Recovery
Whatever you choose to do, we recommend at least two nonconsecutive days of resistance training each week if you are working your full body. You can add more days gradually, but not train the same body part on back-to-back days.
Aim For At Least 20 To 30 Minutes Per Session
If you’re a young, healthy adult, you will get the maximum benefit out of resistance training by working with a weight that fatigues your muscles within a shorter duration of repetition — typically 8 to 12 reps.
For an older person, it is best to focus more on endurance, so we urge 15 repetitions.
Consider A Split Program
Consider working two contrasting muscle groups on the same day. For example, you can do a push with a pull exercise — focus on chest exercises with back exercises.
By concentrating on these muscle groups in a week, you are able to isolate more on those muscle groups instead of trying to hit every body part in 20 to 30 minutes each day you do resistance training.
Vary Your Routine for Optimum Results
No matter what sort of resistance training you choose, make sure you’re consistent, but vary your routine.
If you are not varying your resistance and your exercises, you are not getting the full benefits out of the resistance. If you perform the same routine for years, muscle memory sets in and it will be difficult for your muscles to adapt to a new workload.
Try different things to vary your exercise — use the machines at the gym one day and take a Pilates class on another day, or use bands one week and machines the following week.
As with all exercise, don’t forget to drink plenty of water to keep your body hydrated you workout. Use these tips to build a varied routine that will strengthen all of your muscles and help you live a longer, healthier life.