Should you be strength training?
There’s one quick trick anyone can do, that’ll make you worse at all your physical activities, decrease your resilience to injuries, and potentially even shorten your lifespan…
And that’s to not strength train.
Being strong just makes life better.
If you’re a Boulderite, and enjoy outdoor activities, you’ve probably already heard how stronger legs will help you in any and all of your mountainous sports. But what about the rest of the body? Why ought you get your whole body strong? What if you only like climbing, or running/hiking?
To be clear, I am not advocating everyone become a bodybuilder. You don’t need to shift your focus to building twenty pounds of lean muscle to enjoy your life and sports to the utmost.
With what you’re already working with though, it can be made strong and resilient, and give a real boost to your activities of choice. It does so in three ways.
First, is how strength training increases your peak ability. Meaning, when you want to pull your hardest on a rock, press your hardest on a bike pedal, or jump just a little farther between rocks on your hike or scramble, you’re relying on the peak power of your current muscles. That’s the top of your performance pyramid, ‘peak’ power. The base, is your reservoir of strength. What can you perform for 4-7 repetitions, or a 10-20 second hold? Your answer to that sets the bar for how high your peak can go. So, if you’re looking for that extra spark, a little more juice, strength training will give you that.
Second, is by maintaining or building lean tissue. This includes your tendons and ligaments. Like how strength is the foundation of your peak power, muscle tissue is the foundation of your strength. More tissue = more potential strength. But, the concealed benefit is how robust it makes your joints. It does this by thickening your tendons and ligaments, making them more resilient to impact and repeated exposure from repetitive motions (biking, rowing, running, etc). This new tissue will stick around for years, even a lifetime, with minimal work after it is developed. As long as you use it, it’ll take care of you well into old age.
The third reason everyone should strength train, is metabolic health. Muscle and lean tissue are your metabolic engines, and putting in effort to build and upkeep them is crucial for health and longevity. Lean tissue determines your basal metabolic rate (BMR), which is the energy needed for your body to live. So, if you like to eat, you want this number to be much higher in general, then you’ll be able to enjoy much more food before it starts to accumulate as fat. It’s much more difficult to get to and stay at a healthy body fat level without having lean tissue built up. The fortunate thing is, strength training is very approachable for anybody at any size, so it’s always an inclusive option for health and longevity as well.
While you can absolutely be more healthy by building good habits at any body weight, the evidence continues to show on average that people with higher levels of body fat as they age have both shorter lifespans and healthspans, meaning the length of time they enjoy the everyday activities of life in a capable body. If you desire to age gracefully, this is one of the biggest reasons you should get into consistent strength training.
To wrap it all up, being strong makes life easy, and fun!
It helps you do cooler crazier shit, it holds you together no matter what you’re doing (to an extent, wear a parachute if you go skydiving etc), and it keeps you metabolically young. If there were ever a panacea of health, it would be strength, up to a point at least.
So get after it, and let’s get those numbers up.
