http://www.drmcguff.com/need-strength-training/
Want to look better in your clothes (or out of them)? Strength training is the answer. Want to address almost any disease state (diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, cognitive decline, obesity, metabolic syndrome)? Strength training is the answer.
Are you about to enter into chemotherapy? Strength Training will help prevent cachexia and even help defeat your foe. Are you suffering from depression? You guessed it… Strength training. In almost all of these situations, strength training is not just adjunctive; it is the most effective measure you can take, with other measures adding adjunctive to marginal value. It seems that we have evolved from struggle in the constant presence of gravity and our adaptation to this fact have given us a tool to solve almost any problem.
When it comes to strength training, I have some definite opinions on the best and most efficient way to perform it, but those opinions are not as strong as my belief that you should perform strength training in almost any form. Muscle has evolved over billions of years and is the most adaptive and plastic tissue there is. As such, strength training can be incredibly simple, precisely because muscle is so complex.
There are many different ways to train and skeletal muscle will adapt to them all. My only major objection as to the form of training will be towards those techniques which pose an undue risk of injury. As Arthur Jones once said “It won’t matter if you have 20 inch arms if you injure your back”. Or, as I say in my elevator pitch when people ask me about Ultimate Exercise (my personal training facility), “It’s like Crossfit… without the torn rotator cuff”.
In the past 10 years the scientific literature has exploded with studies that uncover benefits to strength training that we never imagined. Much of this linked to myokines, the hormone-like substances released by exercising muscle that signal benefits all the other tissues of the body.
