Benefits of Resistance Training

Resistance training has increased in popularity and is being incorporated in more fitness programs because of the variety of exercises which you can do with exercise resistance bands and due to the convenience of being able to exercise at home instead of having to go to the gym. Resistance training is effective for developing both upper and lower body strength.

“Resistance” refers to any force your muscles attempt to overcome in order to move. For example, when you stretch an exercise resistance band you are increasing the resistance. Resistance training exercises can be performed using dumbbells, machines, your own body weight, gravity, and of course exercise rubber bands as they are all different forms of resistance. When you do a push up, you press your hands into the floor and straighten your arms to lift your body weight upward, otherwise known as resistance. Doing push ups all the time to develop strength and fitness would become monotonous very quickly, which is why it would be a good idea to incorporate resistance band exercises in to your resistance training program.

All forms of resistance training involve performing a few repetitions (usually between six and fifteen reps) using relatively heavy resistance, as opposed to aerobic activities like cycling which involve high repetitions and low resistance. You should use enough resistance to make each set challenging enough to tire you out and, in effect, stress your muscles. The effect of the exercise is that it will literally tear your muscles apart.

It’s important that you give the muscles that you’re working out at least 48 hours of rest between resistance training workouts. This is because it takes that amount of time for the muscles to repair, rebuild, and recover. By the way, the same holds true for any particularly intense aerobic or strength training workout. Most aerobic exercises aren’t intense enough to tear up your muscles (at the microscopic level). But notice that when you do all out wind sprints or heavy duty hills, your muscles are sore for a couple of days afterwards.

Eventually your muscles adapt to the resistance they push against by becoming stronger. That’s why you can lift progressively heavier weights and why, eventually, you’re going to have to look for a way to make those push ups more challenging.

Increasing the number of sets you do, slowing down your reps or adding a resistance exercise band to your workouts are three ways of increasing training intensity for increased strength and endurance.