Whether You’re 27 or 72 You NEED To Be Lifting Weights.

Why building and maintaining muscle mass is the key to health and longevity.

I truly believe strength training has saved my life, probably more than once.

It has both helped me through and pulled me out of some dark mental ruts and has given me a hobby that lets me turn my headphones on, de-stress, and improve both my mental and physical well-being.

Just like Arnold Schwarzenegger said, the "pump" feels awesome.. but It’s the stress relief/outlet that really does it for me. Because of that, it’s become a downright addiction. But, I’m incredibly grateful that IT has become my addiction, as opposed to so many other possibilities.

It’s shocking when you see studies that show at least 60 percent of American adults ‘don’t even lift’. That needs to change, as it’s probably the most effective way to handle stress, build mental resilience, and prevent obesity, diabetes, osteoporosis, premature aging, chronic pain, and a host of other things.

I’m here to argue that it’s far better than cardiovascular exercise.

While this article aims not to downplay the importance of training your ticker, the benefits of weight training and preserving lean muscle tip the scale heavy in its direction when comparing the two.

For years, I just thought I was biased because of my own little addiction to it. However, much of the current literature has spelled out what I’ve been thinking for a long time. Strength training to build and/or preserve muscle mass is probably the most effective thing you can do with the precious time you allocate for exercise.

Let’s dive into some of the reasons why.

Contrary to popular belief, resistance training is not dangerous or “injury-inducing” as you age. It’s actually extremely safe, as long as you use some common sense and don’t let your ego get the best of you.

When you do cardiovascular exercise often, your body adapts. It wants to get better at that task. This has benefits, of course, but some of the benefits come with some cons as well.

I know, getting better at cardiovascular activity sounds like it’s a major advantage, but let me explain why it may not be. When you get “better” at cardio your body adaptively begins to use less energy during said cardio.

Sparing energy means sparing calories, so your body goes after its primary calorie-burning tissue… your precious, hard-earned muscle. This is why endurance athletes (runners, cyclists, cardio bunnies, etc) are usually skinnier, and often look, well, malnourished…

Hours and hours of jogging, walking, and cycling may seem much “safer” than lifting weights, but I’m here to argue that, in the grand scheme of things, copious amounts of cardio is more dangerous than lifting weights and resistance training.

Ok, before I completely lose you, let’s hammer this home; Cardio makes you better at cardio.

• This includes making you better at preserving energy during cardiovascular tasks.

• Over time this process will actually SLOW your metabolic rate via shedding the super metabolically expensive muscle tissue.

• This makes losing fat, harder.

• Having less lean tissue, a slower metabolic rate, and more body fat sets you up to have problems with a whole host of other issues.

Now, I know most cardio queens and kings are usually skinny minis and don’t appear to have much body fat, but I can tell you, without resistance training, they're usually doing a TON of that cardio to maintain that skinny mini frame, or they’re starving themselves, one or the other.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that running, specifically, results in more injuries than probably any other fitness-related activity. If you want to fact-check me on that, this article is well-sourced and will help you. https://www.exercisinghealth.net/blog/barefoot-running-technique-simplified

Also, when injuries happen, nearly all physical therapy protocols involve loading (resisting) the problematic tissue (to make it adapt, get stronger, and become resilient again). The very process by which you recover from an injury often could have prevented it, in many cases.

Metabolic Adaptation

The phenomenon we’re most concerned with here is a relatively new concept called metabolic adaptation. It’s basically your body slowing down its calorie burn by reducing muscle mass.

Muscle is the most metabolically active and expensive tissue we have, and in today’s world, we want to maintain a robust active metabolism at all costs.

I often tell people to just ditch the cardio, and just try to move more throughout the day. Now, when I say “ditch” the cardio, I don’t mean to never do it or to fear it. Obviously, there are plenty of benefits to training your ticker. Your heart is also a muscle, and having healthy heart rate variability and an efficient cardiovascular system is very important.

Hitting the treadmill or stair master for 15-20 minutes after your resistance training is not going to melt your muscle away, and it’s probably a good habit to get into. I just want you to ditch it as far as it being THE priority when it comes to your exercise regimen. Resistance training is far more important.

You don’t want to lose weight, you want to lose FAT

Throughout the article, I am going to continue to highlight that we want to preserve lean muscle tissue at all costs. Dieting, or attempting to lose weight without stimulating your system to preserve lean tissue, can do a number on your metabolism.

I’m always telling clients that It’s really difficult to outsmart your physiology. Again, your muscle tissue is the most metabolically expensive tissue you have, therefore, when restricting calories, it's the first thing to go. With it, goes your metabolism and your ability to BURN calories, which just optimizes the environment to slap fat right back on once you’ve given up on your diet.

When you look around you may think this country has a problem with weight gain, and it does. Obviously, our convenience-driven standard American diet (SAD), is a problem and our way of life can slap fat on someone faster than anywhere else in the world (but that’s an entirely different discussion). However, people that try to lose weight, often successfully do. The problem is they can’t keep it off.

Weight regain stats will boggle your mind. According to certain studies, within one year of weight loss:

• 50-70% of people will have regained all the weight they lost.

Within two years of weight loss:

• 85% of people will gain it all back.

Within three years:

• 95% of people will have gained it all back.

Therefore, the average long-term success rate of dieting is ~5%. Yikes.

As mentioned above, muscles are active and very metabolically active tissues. They're kind of greedy when it comes to calories. They require a lot of energy (calories) just to maintain themselves. I like to use a car analogy here and think in terms of fuel efficiency.

Muscles, similar to muscle cars, don’t have great fuel efficiency. Instead of thinking about miles per gallon (MPG), I think about muscles needing a certain amount of “calories per gram” (CPG) of tissue, they need more to get their work done.

Now, think about a world where you can hardly get away from fuel. It’s virtually unlimited (thanks to modern agriculture and manufacturing). It’s bombarding you everywhere you go. Well, that’s kind of like the food landscape we do live in, where we’re flooded with dense deposits of calories (calorie-dense foods) at every turn. It sure would help to have the F-250 versus the Prius in this situation, so we burn through that abundance of fuel, with less efficiency. This helps to buffer the calorie-dense standard American diet.

If that analogy just confused you, just understand your physiology wants to be efficient. So, if we have an abundance of fuel we can’t burn through, we just store it as body fat, saving it for a starvation situation that never comes. In addition, if your body doesn’t think it needs muscle, it gets rid of it and won’t waste precious calories maintaining it, (i.e. hogging all the gas).

Having a less fuel-efficient vehicle (more muscle mass) the more calories you will expend and the more fat you will burn. That is what it means to have a faster metabolism.

Resistance training is currently the most helpful tool we have to preserve, and build muscle. Again, you want to lose body fat, not muscle.

So, let’s minimize, or ditch the cardio completely, for now, and let's focus on hitting the weights.

Ditching Diabetes

You do not want to deal with diabetes, just take it from me. It’s a terrible disease that wreaks havoc on so many structures and biological processes. It’s a mess.

One of the primary players in the development of diabetes, particularly type II diabetes, is a hormone called insulin. It acts mainly as an usher to carry blood sugar into cells to be burned for energy. It also plays a role in the signaling mechanism for sugar storage in the form of fat.

Insulin responds to many different nutrients, but none more abruptly than fast-digesting carbohydrates (sugars, flour, etc). Sometimes excess sugar piles up in the blood and your pancreas pumps out insulin to help shove the sugar into the cells and lower the sugar in the blood.

This leads to high levels of insulin in the blood, and over time specific cells can stop responding appropriately to insulin. This is called insulin resistance, and it leads to a build-up of both sugar and insulin in the blood. This is “no bueno” considering the consequences of uncontrolled blood sugar can include:

• Oxidation

• Heart disease or heart attack

• Stroke

• Kidney damage

• Nervous system damage

• Numbness, tingling, nerve decay

• Eye damage

But guess what!? You probably guessed it.

The healthy metabolic function of MUSCLE helps remedy this chaotic situation. Resistance training and healthy muscle tissue play an important role in utilizing blood sugar, and making those cells more sensitive and receptive to insulin. And Voila! That dangerous buildup of blood sugar and insulin in the blood has a remedy.

Testosterone:

This one is pretty obvious. But with testosterone rates in men falling off a cliff in the last few decades, it’s important to talk about it. If you’re a dude, low T can wreck your motivation, strength, and health. Usually the higher testosterone in men the better. Testosterone naturally declines as men age, however, resistance training raises it no matter the age, across the board, period. Copious amounts of cardio can actually tank a man’s muscle mass and testosterone.

But how about the ladies?

Resistance training can raise their testosterone levels too, however, if their levels are normal to begin with, it doesn’t seem to nearly as it does in men (men’s will often still increase even if it’s already high). Many experts actually believe resistance training is a great hormone balancer in women.

The main signal resistance training sends is to build more lean tissue, and this requires balanced hormones. If your body is convinced it needs to build strength and muscle, it optimizes hormones to do so.

Myokines:

We briefly explained the pancreas secretes insulin to help clear blood sugar a little bit ago. Well the muscle tissues themselves secrete hormone-like messengers as well, making them actually endocrine (hormone-producing) organs as well. This is ground-breaking stuff as until recently we looked at muscle tissue from a purely mechanical viewpoint.

Myokines are small messenger proteins that are produced when our muscles contract. Myokines send positive messages to other muscle cells, fat cells, and several other important organs.

When produced, myokines promote a bunch of beneficial processes within the body leading to:

• healthier blood vessels

• lower blood sugar and cholesterol levels

• muscle cell growth

• fat loss

• enhanced memory

• reduced inflammation

• lower risk of many chronic diseases

Bottom line, our health benefits tremendously from myokine production.

Research is still aiming to prove exact mechanisms and roles, but it’s pretty clear that resistance training is probably the most effective way to maximize the production of myokines.

Have you been tallying up all these benefits? Let’s keep going.

Not long ago a big systematic review and metanalysis (study of a bunch of studies) was published that compared strength training to stretching as far as its ability to improve mobility. Believe it or not, both showed similar improvements in overall mobility. This was shocking to many experts in the industry as the common misconception of strength training was often associated with bodies getting “tighter” and “stiffer”. Wrong. It actually showed the same mobility gains as static stretching, and the researchers gave the edge to strength training because of all the other benefits that come along with it, like strength gains and many of the other benefits we’ve already discussed.

We don’t hurt because we move too much; we hurt because we move too little.

Strong, stable bodies are less prone to injury, period. As a chiropractor who has helped thousands of people recover from back pain, neck pain, headaches, and numerous mechanical difficulties, I speak from experience in stating that. A strong stable lumbo-pelvic-hip region is critical in long-term low back pain recovery, and that's just a common microcosm of the bigger picture throughout the entire body.

Many people suffer from pain that comes from weak movement patterns due to weak musculature. Weakness leads to compensation. Compensation leads to certain movement mechanisms taking on roles they’re not designed for.

Moving more, moving well, and strengthening and preserving muscle mass help to ensure quality movement, and minimal wear and tear.

Muscle Loss Is Dangerous

After the age of 30, most adults typically lose 3-8% of their muscle mass per decade, which ramps up their risk of developing a multitude of chronic diseases.

The risk of developing cognitive diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer's increases with age. There’s evidence that resistance training may help mitigate symptoms associated with and/or reduce the risk of developing these diseases.

I love women. Trust me. But here is where I’m going to have to use a little “tough love”. The only thing they should worry about getting “too big” is their waistlines. So many women dodge lifting weights because of the classic excuse that they don’t want to get “too big”. This comes from a serious lack of understanding, and “burned-in” images and stereotypes of the extremes of bodybuilding.

The top female bodybuilders, particularly, have scared so many women into becoming cardio bunnies that they should be receiving endorsements from treadmill companies.

Cardio Bunny -

Noun.

a popular term used among gym goers to describe a woman who is constantly on the treadmill or elliptical, performing cardio for hours on end, and hardly ever resistance training.

These big, gaudy, muscle-bound bodies have only been achieved by the pinnacle of that particular sport, and that image has required years of insane amounts of dedication, training, and drugs. Thinking you’re going to look like that from leisurely lifting weights, is like thinking you put on some “tennis shoes” and now you can hang with Serena Williams. It’s not going to happen.

Most women just can’t build big bulging muscles like men can, due to only having a fraction of the testosterone that men naturally have. And like we said earlier, it’s metabolically expensive to have more muscle, even for men, so men can’t do it easily either (it usually takes years without drugs).

I would actually like to make the case that in this day and age, resistance training may even be MORE important for women than it is for men.

Metabolism -

With lower testosterone levels, women naturally have slower metabolisms and more tendency to put on and carry body fat. Of course, some body fat is healthy. I don’t think women should look like sticks with muscles hanging off them. However, when a handful of conditions are right, body fat accumulation can go off the rails in a hurry. Once body fat accumulates, it’s a whole lot harder to get it off and keep it off than it is to never put it on, to begin with.

Strength and Stability Post Partum

I also think that the very nature of carrying and delivering a child does a number on a woman's physical stability. Nearly every time a see a post-partum female with lower back pain come into my office, I immediately think of sacroiliac joint (the joint between the pelvis and bottom portion of the spine - the sacrum, which tends to become painful due to instability) dysfunction, because it’s that common. The only way to create more stability in that region is to restore good mechanics and load them (resistance train).

Bone Density:

Lifting weights doesn’t just work on the muscles either, it also helps to build and maintain bone density and prevent osteopenia and osteoporosis (which considerably affects more women than men). With resistance training, your bones respond the same way your muscles do—they get denser and stronger. That’s because you’re placing stress (resistance) on them. Like muscle, bone adapts to stress by becoming stronger.

Hormones:

We also mentioned earlier how resistance training helps hormone balance (which tend to fluctuate wildly in women as they age).

Once women break through the fear of looking like a female Arnold Schwarzenegger and start sculpting their bodies, they tend to feel a boost in self-esteem and gain renewed physical and mental strength because of their new sexy shape. Resistance training is a gift for women.

This brings us to one of my favorite reasons for resistance training… Aesthetics.

Muscle Just Looks Better.

Let’s face it. We live in a very vain, appearance-driven, Instagram-obsessed society. Though it's obviously not the most important aspect of someone, we would be lying to ourselves if we didn’t think snap judgments are constantly being made, and didn’t think the way we look mattered.

My favorite feature is the ability to use resistance training to literally shape and sculpt your body as you see fit. This works not only on your body but also on your mind. It sort of instills a “growth mindset”, and shows you you’re not just stuck with what you got. You can change your body. If you can change your body, you can change your mind, your IQ, your financial situation, and your life.

As I touched on earlier, there are numerous mental health benefits to resistance training, but we’ll save that rabbit hole for a different article.

Back to the body for a bit. Sculpting your body to your more designed shape can be quite a creative hobby. It can be your art, and what better canvas than your own physical body? As you work to shape and contour your body like a statue that you’re proud of, you benefit from all the other aspects we’ve already discussed. No other form of exercise does this.

I think this is a “no-brainer” hobby everyone should engage in.

Muscle Simply Helps You Not Die

So to recap, muscle mass is an endocrine organ of longevity.

And this list isn’t even all of it.

If your muscles are healthy, you live better. The quality of your life directly correlates to your muscle health.

You don’t have time

NOT TO DO IT.

From my perspective, preserving the health of your tissues is the only way to get time back. When all your friends have busted up knees, shoulders, huge beer bellies, and diabetes, your consistency cranking away at the weights will make you appear as if you’ve freaking SLOWED TIME. I meet people in the gym in their 50s, 60s, and 70s that still look incredibly fit and healthy.

They've simply chosen a path of preservation.

Their dedication to their physical well-being has preserved muscle mass, joint health, and minimized excessive fat gain. I'm convinced this will preserve their "golden year" aesthetics, health, and quality of life more than anything else.

Resistance training is super time efficient as well. Many trainers, experts, and gym-goers have seen positive results and benefits of resistance training at as little as 60-90 minutes per WEEK. That could be 20-30 minutes, 3 times a week. I don’t care who you are, there’s no way you couldn’t carve that out of your busy schedule.

Your health is your greatest asset, there’s just no getting around that. You can go on believing that hitting the weights just isn’t for you, or you don’t have time, but you’re leaving a whole bunch of quality of life on the table.

Off to the gym now,

Health Disclaimer: The information provided in this article is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any health conditions, nor should it be considered a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult with your doctor or qualified healthcare provider before starting any new health program, making changes to your diet, taking supplements, or if you have questions about your medical condition. Your health decisions should be based on discussions with your healthcare team, not on the content you read online.