How Strength Training Can Help Seniors Preserve Independence

Strength training can help seniors preserve independence. Here are 5 reasons why it is important. 

Increase Metabolism

Muscle is very active tissue and therefore requires a lot of calories in three critical ways. First, it burns a lot of calories during strength training. Second, it continues to burn a lot of calories after the strength training session is over. Third, it burns a significant number of calories when the body is at rest.

For these three reasons, adding more muscle to the body means increasing metabolism. This is especially critical as we age because metabolism gradually slows down the older we get.

For young adults and middle-aged people, it is necessary to strength train 3 times per week to experience maximum benefits. However, seniors can expect to reap great rewards from lifting weights only 2 times per week.

Increase Functional Capacity

This is the name of the game when it comes to maintaining an active lifestyle and living independently as long as possible. These are two of the most important things that most seniors desire. Maintaining functional capacity is much more easily achieved when seniors strength train.

Disease Management and Prevention

Incorporating strength training into the lifestyles of seniors is critical to ensuring that this dream can be realized for them. It is proven that as we get into our later years, if we do not strength train we will lose a great deal of our muscle mass. Strength training twice per week can help seniors to not only maintain their muscle, but gain muscle.

Decreased Body Fat

A decrease in body fat comes as a consequence of increased metabolism. This decrease in body fat can help ease the load of the amount of work the joints have to do which will contribute to more years with a higher quality of life and less pain.

This drop in body fat can also help with other chronic diseases that many seniors suffer from. Maintaining a healthy weight contributes to better blood sugar control in diabetes. It also helps reduce the risk of developing cancer and heart disease, the two most common causes of death in the United States today.

Decrease Lower Back Pain

Studies have attributed high incidences of low back pain with the low rate of core body strength in many individuals. The core is made up of the muscles in the lower back, abdominal muscles, and internal and external obliques on the sides of the body.

For these reasons, it's important that increasing core strength is a goal of the senior's strength training program.