Personal training weight lifting and health.If this doesn't convince you......

So, I’ve made the argument for weight-lifting before, that it is the best way to look good while not taking up so much of your time that you become an anti-social recluse…but if that’s what you like to be, then recluse away. On the other hand, if you’d like to look and feel good, and, oh, I don’t know, have a life too, then here is an interesting study to attempt to bring you to the light.

In the book ‘The New Rules of Lifting’, by Lou Schuler, he talks about a study that was conducted between 1979 and 1997. The study followed 2,000 middle-aged men in the United Kingdom and it looked at their exercise patterns and physical activity. The results of the study were published in the journal ‘Heart’ in 2003 and found, among other things, that those who engaged in light to moderate physical activity (walking, gardening, playing golf, bowling) had no effect on heart disease, death from heart disease, or death from all causes, even if they did up to 90 minutes a day of those activities, they got no measurable protection from heart disease or any other terminal illness.

The ones who did get that protection were those who did “heavy” exercise (climbing stairs, playing vigorous start-stop sports like tennis, hiking, jogging, swimming, serious landscaping work). Also, they only needed to burn as little as 54 calories a day doing that heavy exercise.

If you weigh 150 pounds, an hour of serious weight-lifting will burn about 350 calories, divide that by 7 and it comes to 50 calories a day, so, according to that study, an hour of heavy exercise a week offers you more protection from heart disease or death from any cause than 90 minutes a day of walking.

There are many types of “heavy” exercise, they include weight-lifting, swimming, hiking, running, cycling, rowing, tennis, basketball, soccer, and plenty of others. So, while we at Fast Twitch are a bit biased toward weight-lifting, any kind of hard physical activity is really what is going to be the best thing for your health. So get lifting or do something else challenging, and eat Cheerios, because it’s got whole grains!