Joan Price:

After age 45, women and men lose muscle strength and muscle mass at the rate of 5 percent per decade.
Between ages 40 and 70, women lose 7 to 11 pounds of muscle; men lose 12 to 20.
By age 74, one-third of all men and two-thirds of all women cannot lift an object weighing 10 pounds.
All of the above are preventable with strength training!

Why Strength-Train?

Muscle makes you look good, feel good, and burn calories faster; it keeps your bones strong and helps you stay active and independent well into old age. Strength training helps you look and feel younger. Toned muscles fill up previously sagging skin to give your body a tight, shapely look. Your posture improves, and you feel strong and confident.

Improved strength also helps you lead a physically active lifestyle with more energy and less risk of injury. This helps you in all parts of your life, not just your exercise hours. You'll carry kids, golf clubs, and groceries without back strain, climb stairs without huffing and puffing, and pull your suitcases out of the car without wrenching your shoulder. And you'll feel powerful. So don't resign yourself to getting weaker with the years--get stronger instead!

Strength training can also help increase insulin action to help avoid diabetes, compensate for unstable joints in people with arthritis, increase mobility and decrease pain in people with rheumatoid arthritis, and accelerate bowel transit time, improving gastrointestinal health.

What a deal to get all this with a program that can take less than an hour a week!

Guidelines for Effective Strength Training

First warm up the muscles you're going to use, without weights. Get the muscles and joints in motion with rhythmic movement, going through each group you plan to work. Or do 5 to 10 minutes of an all-purpose exercise that warms up all your muscles for you, such as dancing, rowing, or brisk walking with arms swinging.
Always perform the movements slowly. A 6-second repetition or even slower is recommended by most strength-training experts for maximum strength gains. The aim isn't to get to the end of a move, but rather to feel the move every inch of the way. If you rush the move, you let momentum or other muscles help, and you're short-changing the muscles you want to strengthen. Return to your starting position even more slowly than you left it--don't just release.
Work through the full range of motion as recommended for each exercise. Don't shorten the move or just do the part that's easy.
Breathe! Exhale on the lifting or pulling phase; inhale lowering or releasing. Don't hold your breath.
Keep the resistance difficult for maximum progress. Choose a weight or intensity at which you can perform only 8 to 12 repetitions (called "reps") in slow, controlled, proper form. Your muscle should be temporarily fatigued at that point. Once you can do 12 reps in good form, increase the weight or resistance slightly so that you can do only 8 reps.
Stretch each muscle group when you're done. If you don't stretch, you leave your muscles contracted, often resulting in soreness the next day and a decrease in flexibility over time. So always end your workout with 5 minutes of stretching.
For best results, strength-train regularly, but no more than three times a week. Your muscles need 48 hours to recover from intense work and get stronger. Fill in those alternate days with aerobic exercise or active leisure activities for balanced fitness.
Don't overdo it. Better to do a little less than you can than too much when you're first learning your limits. Overdoing it leads to pain, discouragement, and even injury. Mild soreness the next day--a slight ache or stiffness--just means your muscles are adapting and it will pass. But if you're feeling pain that interferes with your day, you overdid it.
Stay in tune with how your body feels at all times. If a move hurts, don't do it. Pain in the joints means something is wrong. Check your technique carefully. If your technique is right and you still experience joint pain, stop. Be careful of previous injuries. Test an injured area with no weight or light weight. If there's any pain, stop. Pay particular attention to old injury sites. Those areas may not be as strong as before, even though you think they're completely healed. Get medical advice about rehabilitation exercises if you find you have these weak or sensitive spots.
Log your workouts to track your progress. Keep track of the muscle groups worked, the amount of weight, and number of repetitions for each one. You'll be surprised at how quickly you progress.

Getting Results

Maybe you think strength training is too hard or time-consuming to be worth the trouble. Not at all! Dramatic improvements happen very quickly, within the first 8 to 12 weeks, and take a much smaller time investment than you probably expect.

Even 20 minutes, 2 or 3 times a week, will bring noticeable strength gains and muscle definition. Three times a week is recommended, but you'll get at least 75 percent of the benefits of 3 times by doing it just twice a week. Even once a week will help you maintain strength, so don't give up the ship if you find you're missing workouts.

You can use free weights (dumbbells), machines, or other strength-training tools. Latex bands are effective alternatives to free weights for strength training, especially for beginners, and are a lot cheaper, easier to store, and more portable--and you don't have to worry about dropping one on your toe. I recommend Dyna-Bands®: 3-foot-long latex bands made specifically for strength training, in 4 different resistance levels.

I hope that once you get used to strength training, you'll enjoy--as I do--the incredible feeling of strength and power that comes with pushing your muscles to their limit and seeing them come back stronger.

For more information about strength training,
see Joan's recommended books and videos.

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