7 Reasons Women Over 30 Should Lift Weights
This is your sign to get in the weight room.
As a woman that goes to the gym, do you avoid lifting weights and focus mainly on cardio? While cardio-based exercises are great for your health, it’s also important to consider how weight-lifting can enhance your workout and improve your health, all while creating the results you’re looking for.
Strength training, also known as resistance training, uses a lower number of reps to build muscle mass using bands, kettlebells, weights, and even your own body weight. It improves your posture, increases estrogen, and lowers the risk of osteoporosis and heart disease, especially in women.
In this post, we’ll go over a few reasons why it’s crucial for women to add weight-lifting to their exercise regimens. Let’s get started.
7 Benefits of Weight-Lifting
- Increased Metabolism
As you increase muscle mass, you also increase fat loss, which is important for those seeking to shed weight. Lifting heavy weights increases metabolism by building muscle tissue and burn more calories than fat tissue while at rest.
These types of workouts also create an “afterburn effect” that allows your body to use the extra energy to repair muscles for up to 48 hours after you exercise.
2. A More Toned Physique
Many women exercise because they’re looking to create a more toned, muscular physique, which you can’t achieve with just cardio alone. Adding weight-lifting ensures that you work specific muscles to get the look you want.
A common misconception many have about lifting weights is that it will automatically create a “bulky” physique, but this isn’t always the case.
Because women have naturally lower testosterone levels than men, lifting weights will usually result in a sculpted, lean physique rather than a stocky, more “masculine” one.
3. Build Stronger Bone Density
As women age, they start to lose muscle mass and bone density, which can lead to complications like osteoporosis or brittle bones. Out of about 10 million Americans with osteoporosis, approximately 80% are women, which makes it even more essential to partake in weight-lifting exercises.
Weight training triggers bone growth by putting mechanical stress on your bones. As muscles pull on them, they trigger bone-forming cells to create new tissue, increasing your overall bone density.
Some key exercises to increase bone density include:
- Deadlifts: Weight is lifted from the floor to hip level
- Overhead Presses: An upper-body strength exercise that builds triceps, deltoids, and upper chest
- Squats and Lunges: Lower-body exercises that build leg strength and stability
4. Improved Hormone Health
As you age, it becomes increasingly important to have balanced hormone health. Lifting weights stimulates the production of testosterone and growth hormone (HGH), which help to build muscle. It balances estrogen and progesterone which help to regulate your menstrual cycle and reduce painful symptoms of perimenopause, or PMS.
Additionally, weight training enhances your muscles’ ability to absorb glucose, which stabilizes your blood sugar levels and prevents insulin resistance. It lowers your overall cortisol levels as well, a stress hormone that manages the body’s immune and inflammatory responses.
5. Increased Confidence
When you first start out on your fitness journey, the thought of weight-lifting can seem daunting and outright scary. But once you realize it’s just another workout and gain familiarity with the movements, you’ll quickly gain confidence as you see results.
As you continue to increase your weight and capability around your training, you’ll quickly gain confidence and adopt mental resilience. Tracking your progress will show you how far you’ve come over time so you can keep seeing results and feel proud of the work you’ve put in.
Once you see that you’re adding more weight to your training, you’ll feel accomplished and reassured that you’re moving in the right direction because you’re seeing tangible results, which is always a confidence booster.
6. Easier Fat Loss
Many women work out for the main purpose of losing fat, which weight-lifting was made for. It boosts weight loss by building lean muscle which increases your resting metabolic rate, and this allows you to burn more calories.
Strength training combined with a calorie deficit and taking protein will guarantee that you lose fat instead of muscle, and enhance your overall body composition.
7. Prevents The Loss of Muscle as You Age
As you age, issues with mobility become more common. Studies show that approximately 30% of adults over the age of 70 have difficulty walking, getting up, or climbing. This makes it difficult to maneuver through everyday life and complete simple tasks. Limitations in mobility also leads to chronic diseases, increased fall risks, and mortality.
No matter what age you begin your weight training journey, late is always better than never. Weight lifting fights sarcopenia, which is the natural muscle loss that occurs as we get older. Consistence resistance training forces your muscles to adapt and repair, which ultimately prevents and reverses decline.
If you've been itching to get in the weight room but don't know where to start, we highly recommend you start with our GROUP CLASSES or PERSONAL TRAINING options. Depending on your preference, you can learn to lift weights in a safe and uplifting environment no matter what. Just check out the links below to get started and view our class schedule!
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