In the early days, this type of training was called progressive resistance exercise or PRE for short. This is the key feature to this type of exercise: it’s progressive. In other words, as you become stronger and the weights you’re currently lifting no longer challenge you, then you increase the resistance to further challenge your muscles thereby stressing them and causing an adaptation that makes you stronger.
The beauty here is that you don’t need fancy equipment to achieve fantastic results. An inexpensive barbell, used in the privacy of your own home, is all that you need for success. Purchasing a few optional pieces of equipment will allow some variations in exercises that will be very productive. But none of these are very expensive. Later on I’ll lay out a complete home exercise barbell program for you.
Science Discovers Resistance Exercise
In the past, the scientific and medical community paid little attention to resistance exercise and its effects on the body. They, like everyone else, considered weightlifting something that makes you muscle-bound while inflating weak egos. With the growth of running and the fitness boom of the mid to late 1970’s, a whole new breed of exercise research scientist developed.
These young scientists are now exploring the benefits of resistance exercise, measuring its effects on the body and showing exactly what physical changes occur. The scientific exploration of resistance exercise is just beginning. Yet, despite this present lack of scientific work, the benefits of resistance training have been known since the days of the Greek athletes.
Physiological Benefits of Resistance Exercise : Body Composition
Resistance exercise can cause a rapid growth of muscle tissue in both men and women. Although there are sex differences, primarily because of the anabolic hormone testosterone, women, as well as men, will readily respond to the growth stimulation provided by resistance exercise, but with not as much muscle growth.
Regular training allows continual stimulation and response. Muscles take on shape, appearing in places that had precious little muscle before. You are able to craft a completely new appearance and persona. Finally, when you’ve achieved your desired shape and look, you simply embark upon a maintenance program, using the same resistance that triggered the transformation. Little further growth occurs at this juncture. It’s like a water spigot; you can turn it up to get a stronger stream or turn it down to reduce it. The good news about resistance exercise is that you can decide what to build or what to leave alone.
For women this is particularly helpful. Women often get fat from the hips down, a pattern of weight gain called “gynoid” or female pattern obesity. Overall weight loss, unfortunately, usually fails to help such women look significantly better than they did before they started their weight loss program.
The body loses fat from areas where it has the most to lose. This is probably hormone-mediated and controlled by an enzyme in the blood vessels of the fat and muscle cells, lipoprotein lipase (LPL). LPL is responsible for grabbing fat as it circulates in the blood and depositing it in fat or muscle cells. Women have more LPL in the fat cells of their hips and thighs than in their waist; men have more in their waist.
As a woman loses weight, she loses it from both her upper body and her lower body. However, since she has less to lose from her upper body, she often looks increasingly gaunt in the torso area because of muscle loss occurring along with her fat loss. This
occurs at the same time that her hips and thighs remain far fatter than she would like.
A woman can avoid this sort of unbalanced loss by concentrating on upper-body muscle building exercises. With this type of exercise, she can replace the lost fat with muscle, permitting her to maintain her upper body size while preventing a drawn, emaciated appearance. As a result, she can afford to continue losing fat from her lower body until she reaches her desired shape. And please note that I said body shape, not bodyweight. The new muscle that she acquires weighs something and contributes to a bodyweight that is inevitably higher than she thinks it should be.
Aerobic exercise can’t equal the body-shaping effect of resistance exercise. The nature of aerobic work is that it doesn’t build significant muscle size because enhanced girth of muscle isn’t needed to do repetitive, low tension exercises. And that’s what aerobic exercise is — repetitive and low tension.
You can can read more about Resistance Training in my book INSANE STRENGTH … Which you can purchase at http://www.isoinsane.com/
