Written by Have you ever considered why strength training is so important to your health, other than to get bigger or stronger muscles? If not, I have forty additional reasons here that WILL convince you.
Strength training is one of the main pillars of great health and is often ignored. Especially by gamers. Why? Because it is often ONLY associated with stronger and bigger muscles. But this is all wrong!
There were so many reasons why everyone should strength train that I couldn’t decide how many I should list for this article. So, I asked the supercomputer, Deep Thought, this 2nd most ultimate question.
And after 6½ million years of me trying to write this thing, Deep Thought finally computed the answer for me. The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything, including how many reasons why everyone needs strength training, is “42”.
What a coincidence. So, now we begin.
Strength training is a form of exercise or activity that helps build muscle strength, power, endurance, or size. Also known as resistance training, there are many forms it can take.
To start, weight lifting is the most well known. Also included are calisthenics and circuit training, my personal favorites, which also features the high intensity interval training (HIIT). There is isometric exercise, an often overlooked strength builder. And of course, yoga, know it or not.
Let’s not forget the more movement based ones. Plyometrics, gymnastics (ever seen a gymnast who isn’t uber strong?), parkour, and even pilates. The list goes on, and all of the above can feature combinations of each, as well.
What is most important, however, is how great all of these, any strength training, CAN be for you. But like everything, you have to choose to do it. Or you suffer from the big “OR”.
You either strength train OR you don’t. You either get the benefits OR you don’t. If you don’t use it you lose it, being stuck with a combination of genetics and whatever damage you have already done to your body. Or 42 reasons are not enough. Or is it Messier 42 (ORion Nebula)?
OR, you can turn it all around with just a little bit of strength training per day, even just a couple times per week.
Plus, there are even more benefits to us gamers, countering many issues created by sitting and gaming too much. Most importantly, though, strength training helps your overall health.
You want proof? You want reasons? Here are 42 reasons why gamers, and everyone else should strength train.
Strength Training CAN Help Your Soft and Hard Tissues
Hard tissue is generally bone here. Soft tissues include muscles, tendons, ligaments, skin, even fat. Though I don’t know if strength training helps your fat, unless of course you are talking reduction.
Nonetheless, these tissues make up a giant part of your body. Here are the reasons strength training can help these tissues individually, and combined.
1 – Hand Dexterity or Stick, Mouse, and Button Coordination
As a for gamers blog, I’m starting with this specifically since our mitts are our prize. Improving your hand dexterity means improving your grasping and coordination.
This, in turn, benefits hand and finger precision in gaming, from aiming to tapping. Which, as we all know, is vital to success. So, be it controller or mouse, strength training is important here to improve our hands and grip.
That will also benefit things like your music playing or typing, among anything else you may do with your hands. It also helps more severe detriments like multiple sclerosis or stroke. More on those later.
2 – Increased Strength or the Obvious
For those uninterested in muscle mass, like myself (mostly), increased strength is still the main catalyst for the many benefits listed in this article. It’s also a natural result of strength training, hence the name.
Defined as the amount of force a muscle can achieve either by pushing or pulling, strength is the key to this whole article! I only list it here to be cool.
For strength increase alone, you just workout in a slightly different way than muscle mass building. Plus, you won’t have to eat as much.
This one is kind of a duh reason, but a reason nonetheless. Don’t worry, you will be a shirtless ripped Gladiolus in no time, just ask the PowerLiftingGamer_ guys.
3 – Increase Muscle Endurance or How To Last Longer
Do you want to do physical activities or game for longer periods of time? Increase your stamina. Strength training will increase your muscle endurance which helps you to maintain performance longer in game and out of game.
Long sessions of playing video games also takes its toll on your body and increased muscle endurance will help manage that.
Unless you are playing a game like Ring Fit Adventure! Here, you can use strength training WHILE gaming for a nice combo! Check out my stream for a lot of this very thing.
Out of game, this applies too, of course. Increased muscle stamina helps you do what you want physically longer as you will tire slower. This includes your physical capacity per activity. It rocks.
4 – Muscle Mass or Them Guns
Strength training is probably known most for muscle building and this includes muscle size. If you want bigger muscles, you have come to the right place.
How does this benefit a gamer specifically? In game, it could increase your chances of breaking a controller.
Other than that, see the many reasons on this article that support bigger (or at least stronger) muscles like improved injury prevention, confidence, metabolism, heart health, and domination (or is it Tomination?) of mankind.
5 – Balance or Reduce Fall Risk
Take your brain, your inner ear, and your muscles, and mix them together and you get balance. Each of these plays an important part in staying upright, but as per this article, let’s focus on the muscle part.
For starters, stability is important for your health. Strengthening the muscles and joints that stabilize you is a must. This will also help your coordination, reaction speeds, and spatial awareness.
Add that to the bonus reaction speed you develop from playing video games, and you got a double whammy here. This combo of increased balance from strength training also reduces your risk from falling. Just ask Sam Porter Bridges from Death Stranding.
Most research I’ve come across states that strength training will help balance and thus help prevent fall risk in older people but I say this goes for all ages. Any day or night one can trip and fall.
Sure, the damage from a fall can easily be more severe if you are a senior. But a fall is still a fall and anything we can do to help this is a plus in my book. Not my eBook, just my book.
6 – Flexibility or Loosen Up
Flexibility is an important part of your fitness health, making physical activities easier and safer to do. It also benefits many things listed here just like strength training does.
Things like posture, injury prevention, mobility (the next one), balance as mentioned, pain relief, all benefit from better flexibility. The list goes on and on.
But strength training and flexibility don’t usually go hand in hand due to outdated information. So how does strength training help with flexibility?
Laura Williams over on Men’s Health, says “Yes, contrary to popular belief, proper strength training may actually improve flexibility and range of motion, you just have to get your strategy right”. And they have the science to back it up.
7 – Mobility
Where flexibility is the ability of a muscle to elongate, mobility is your ability to move a muscle in a range of motion related to a joint socket. Doing strength training exercises that promote full range of motion for your joints will increase their mobility in time.
This shouldn’t be ignored. The better your mobility and flexibility, the less risk you have for injury generally.
8 – Injury Prevention or Not Another Excuse to Game More
Strengthening tendons, ligaments, and muscles decreases the possibility of a strain or tear while protecting your joints. Obviously, this is a big deal.
In a giant study of almost 8000 people published by the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2018, strength training reduced injuries by 66%. That’s pretty huge.
No one wants to be injured. For gamers that want to maintain good health, movement is important so injury prevention is important. Strength training will help this.
9 – Bone Density
The Mayo Clinic says that by stressing your bones, strength training can increase bone density. Good bone density can affect how well you do in different exercises, from most sports to even working out.
Most importantly, it can affect your ability to dance. Vital.
A distant second is protecting your internals like organs. Having strong bones also reduces the risk of osteoporosis, which is close but not the same as osteoarthritis, which I go into a little further down.
Strength Training CAN Keep You From Going BACK to the Doctor
There can be more reasons listed here on how strength training helps your back, but these two are the mains. The others fit nicely into other sections, like injury prevention. You will just have to see how they apply to helping your back!
10 – Posture or PostYour Pic
Most gamers sit when they game. But how and how long one sits is vital to maintaining good back health. Posture is pivotal to this and strength training can help.
WebMD states that the best way to improve your posture is to focus on exercises that strengthen your core: the abdominal and low back muscles that connect to your spine and pelvis. And I agree.
This kind of posture improvement can be gained at any time, including BEFORE problems related to poor posture exist. You want to be aligned and stabilized, right?
Strength training can also strengthen your shoulders to support your neck the right way. As a gamer (non gamers, too!), your posture is vital to keeping you healthy.
Do what I did: look at how you sit from all angles and take pictures of them all. Or better yet, see a chiropractor for an assessment. Then get on it.
Otherwise, you risk back pain and injury.
11 – Back Pain or Back In the Day
Strengthening the back is like strengthening a tree trunk: the stronger it is, the better it is for everything that is connected to it. Which is everything in this case!
Prevention aside, low back pain is common for gamers. Strengthened your back can help remedy this.
Strength training can also help chronic back pain. Don’t ignore your back or one day you may end up wishing you had done something about it sooner, back in the day.
Strength Training CAN Assist In Your Weight Regulation
When I write about health, which is just about ALL I write about, all I see is connections.
I can call a chapter in my eBook The Domino Effect of Sitting Too Much (excerpt here), because all I see are the connections of sitting too much and how that affects health. I can write about diet, and see the connections it has to disease.
I can see the connections diet has to well-being, how disease connects to well-being, too. I can see the connection that well-being has to diet, to exercise, or that exercise has to diet, well-being, disease, gaming, everything!
All I see is connections.
Strength training is exercise and it affects all forms of our health in many ways, many good ways. In fact, it has very few negatives and overwhelmingly positives to our entire life of health, physically, mentally, and thus, spiritually.
12 – Metabolism or How Much You Burn Mostly
The word metabolism is defined many different ways but here we are talking the transforming process of food consumption into energy mixed with the general energy amount the body uses for everything.
Or, how much energy you use naturally.
It can be affected by any number of variables from your skeletal and muscle size, age, gender, genetics, organ size, and especially how and what you eat. Therefore, you really are what you eat, but here you are what you burn.
So, how does strength training affect all of this? I’m glad I asked. It affects the metabolism a few small ways. Generally, people want to increase their metabolism as to not have extra stored fat and to look damn sexy (among other more important health benefits, many listed here).
So, for starters, strength training will make you stronger, which allows allows for more intense workouts due to simply being able to do more, burning more calories. The increased muscle alone will naturally burn more calories due to just everyday muscle maintenance, though it’s not huge.
Plus, your metabolism stays in high gear after your workout, burning more calories naturally than if you were not working out. Bonus! It’s called excess postexercise oxygen consumption (EPOC) and is not huge either but still part of it and better than nothing.
These are the main ways strength training can affect your basic metabolism and all this leads directly into weight loss and maintenance.
13 – Weight Loss and Maintenance or Remember the Human Inflation Equation
The Human Inflation Equation, a chapter of my free eBook (get it here for free), states:
Calories in – Calories used = x. If x > 0, you gain weight. If x < 0, you lose weight.
Strength training fits into the calories used part of the equation. Metabolism is the baseline for the other part of the calories used part.
If you strength train, you are using more calories than otherwise and therefore will lose weight if you don’t over consume. As mentioned before, strength training helps build muscle and that, in turn, naturally burns more calories metabolically.
Using those muscles also burns calories and a lot at that. Exercise is exercise. All of this is part of weight loss and helps with weight maintenance, which is VITAL to the prevention of many health risks and diseases.
“If you can do something that may prevent a disease, would you do it?”
Strength Training CAN Aid in Disease Prevention, Reduction, and Maintenance
Look, to avoid disease entirely is a lottery ticket. There are so many diseases that it would be impossible to go through them all in anything less than a book. The thing is, there seems to be more and more research showing that many diseases are preventable.
So, my question to you is simply this: if you can do something that may reduce your risk of or prevent a disease, would you do it?
14 – Increase Cytokines or How To Pronounce That
Strength or resistance training will inflame your body. That’s how it heals and develops. But when it comes to other inflammations, even chronic, strength training can help.
Muscle and Fitness says “While high resistance training will give you the best results if you want to build mass, even low resistance training can increase the amount of some cytokines, or anti-inflammatory compounds, in the blood. These compounds attack the free radicals that can trigger disease.”
And it’s pronounced SY-toh-kine. So, strength training helps in preventing disease. Good enough reason right? If not, read on.
15 – Cardio Health or How to Avoid the Greatest Killer
Heart and blood vessel health is one of the most important aspects of total health. When it’s bad, it is the biggest killer of humanity and heavily influenced by a sedentary gamer lifestyle.
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) includes heart attack, coronary heart disease, angina, congenital heart disease, stroke, hypertension, and vascular dementia. Strength training is one of the many different ways you can improve cardiovascular health and reduce the effects of a poor diet and a lot of sitting.
According to Maureen Salamon over at WebMD, in a study of around 12,600 people over 5-10 years, up to an hour of weightlifting per week might significantly reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke, high cholesterol, and metabolic syndrome.
She says “Compared with participants who did no resistance exercise, those who took part from one to three times and up to 59 minutes in all each week experienced a risk reduction of up to 70 percent”. And this is just one study.
There are countless studies supporting the use of strength training as a heart disease risk reducer. Gamers, you know what happens in-game when you run out of hearts, and in this life we only have one.
Check out the Domino Effect of Sitting Too Long chapter from my FREE eBook as I go into more detail about how the gamer lifestyle affects the heart.
16 – Stroke or More Heart Disease
Stroke is defined at Medicine Net as the sudden death of brain cells due to lack of oxygen, caused by blockage of blood flow or rupture of an artery to the brain.
Like the above, a stroke is also considered cardiovascular disease. Therefore, the same applies here.
All are interconnected and the benefits of strength training are not isolated to only one cardiovascular or another. It helps all of them.
One thing that is different here, though, is that strength training can still increase your strength after a stroke.
I only list stroke separately due to it happening in the brain and to be informative. Fine, also to make the total number of reasons one more (I had a lot of different CVD’s up my sleeve when in need).
17 – Remedy Cholesterol or Actually the Bad Cholesterol (LDL)
Strength training helps blood flow efficiency which helps remedy bad cholesterol and fat clogged arteries. Keeping it simple here, maybe too simple, but it’s true.
There are many other ways to reduce cholesterol. A big one is your diet, and strength training is part of a balanced exercise diet. So, now’s the time to improve both diets. Both will help far more than just heart disease, too.
18 – Manage and Reverse Type 2 Diabetes or Way Too Sweet For Me
Another disease that is interlinked with heart disease is Diabetes Type 2. The longer you have Type 2 Diabetes, the higher risk for heart disease.
They work hand in hand and have many of the same causes, including not helping reduce the risk of each other. A nice tango, if you may.
What strength training can do is help manage and reverse Type 2 Diabetes by reducing blood sugar (glucose) by increasing muscular glucose absorption. Which sounds amazing to say, but is even more amazing to do.
If you reduce your blood sugar consistently when you have Type 2 Diabetes, you are allowing the pancreas to repair itself and reverse the disease. This will also benefit those without the disease by helping prevent what causes it.
Strength training can also help regulate insulin at the same time by making your body more efficient. This too helps in disease reversal.
According to Beth W. Orenstein, over at Everyday Health, “Pumping your muscles helps push glucose into them; regular strength training helps your body become more efficient at transporting glucose from your bloodstream to your muscles.”
I couldn’t say it better myself. And the better your muscles are at using glucose, the less insulin needed. BOOM! Insulin regulation extra points city!
19 – Reduce Risk of Cancer or Halt Its Return
Not just a little, but strength training helps reduce cancer related deaths by a lot. According to a study by the University of Sydney, covering 80,000 adults over 30 years old, those doing strength training twice a week were 31% less likely to die from cancer.
That’s huge and alone should be enough to add strength training into your daily diet. Gamer or not, you don’t want any cancer. And if you already have cancer, strength training can help you stay alive as well as help prevent it from coming back.
20 – Osteoarthritis or You’re Not Getting Any Younger
I have to put this here because not all of us gamers are young. Osteoarthritis is caused by things like age related circumstances and repetitive joint usage, causing swelling and pain.
Healthline says regular exercise can help slow down, or even prevent osteoarthritis. Strength training is part of this.
Prevention is always the main priority of everything. If you already are showing signs of having this disease, or have it, strength training will help with the advice of your doctor. Don’t ignore it.
21 – Rheumatoid Arthritis or Another Arthritis
Though Rheumatoid Arthritis shares half a name with the previous reason, it is not the same. Rheumatoid Arthritis is caused when your autoimmune system is messing up and causing pain and swelling.
What is the same, though, is that strength training builds your muscles and helps support and protect joints that are affected by arthritis, according to Matt McMillen over at WebMD.
So, it helps with the dealing. Seems like a good bet. Of course, under professional supervision.
22 – Sarcopenia or Say WHAT?
Sarcopenia is the natural loss of muscle associated with aging, but is easily caused by living a sedentary lifestyle, or lack of an active lifestyle.
Gamers take heed: as we age, we will be gaming a lot over time, turning our daily inactivity into years. We can prevent, delay, and reverse sarcopenia through normal weekly strength training.
I don’t want muscle loss, do you?
23 – Slow Parkinsons
Parkinson’s disease is a nervous system disorder that affects movement more and more over time.
Another disease associated more with aging, Parkinson’s may not be preventable through strength training, but strength training can help. It can slow the progression of the disease and improve the symptoms, according to Daniel Corcos, Ph.D.
For gamer’s that have this disease, ask your doctor and physical therapist about strength training. Any tremor reduction could seriously help you, and your gaming quality.
24 – Multiple Sclerosis
Strength training will not prevent Multiple Sclerosis. But, the more strength you have, the easier it will be to move around.
So presuming you have the OK from your doctor, strength training can be a big factor in MS management. And since those with MS already have been proven to benefit mentally from playing video games, you get benefits in and out of game!
Strength Training CAN Prevent and Reduce Gaming Caused Repetitive Strain Injuries
Game caused repetitive strain injuries I say? Heck yes. Video games cause some things and fortunately for us, strength training is often a preventer and reducer of these things. Heck yes.
25 – Gamer’s Thumb or Gamer’s WHAT?
De Quervain’s tenosynovitis, also known as Gamer’s Thumb, is defined by Healthline as an inflammation that causes pain at the thumb side of your wrist where the base of your thumb meets your forearm.
Strength training, in addition to other specific forms of hand exercise, will help you heal faster and reduce symptoms of Gamer’s Thumb.
As Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel would say here, “two thumbs up!” Yet, there is another repetitive thumb injury you can get, too.
26 – Stenosing Tenosynovitis or Trigger Finger
Another similar tenosynovitis, Trigger Finger is when a finger, or thumb, locks up when bent or straight. Think permanent pointing here, only more painful.
The American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons (AAOS) website says that upper body and core strength helps with posture, reducing low back complaints and takes the strain off the smaller hand and arm muscles.
In other words, strengthen things to relieve strain on other things, like Trigger Finger.
27 – Wrist Tendonitis or Not the Same As Carpal Tunnel
Strength training is known to have good preventative skills for wrist tendonitis but it isn’t just a blanket “strength training” that does it. One must have specific exercises targeting the area in order for it to be effective.
Wrist tendonitis is listed here because it is something that gamers get. Many exercises exist that can strengthen the wrist and help pain reduction if you’re looking to avoid the potential. But what is most important is prevention.
28 – Tennis elbow or Gamer’s Elbow or Mouse Elbow or Computer Elbow
“Whatever” elbow is a tendonitis that occurs when your elbow tendons get overused or overloaded, causing some serious pain. This usually stops your ability to move that arm in the same way pretty fast.
Now it should be noted that this tendonitis prevention is geared more at things other than strength training like the angle of your arm in which you play. But there are still benefits in using it.
Doing exercises designed for tennis elbow helps strengthen forearm muscles and improve function, according to Medical News Today. Apply this to all of them, all four of them.
Strength Training CAN Benefit the Brain AND the Mind
All of the use your head stuff goes here. Brain and mind stuff, which are quite different.
The brain is an organ. the mind is all that stuff that kind of goes on in the brain like thoughts, feelings, memories, emotions, ‘tude. There is a lot here and since they affect each other, they are grouped together.
29 – Brain Health or Function
Brain health is a simple phrase describing such a broad scope of variables that its almost an insult. So many things contribute to brain health it’s pointless to list here or we will be here for a while.
Besides, this is about strength training and strength training is continuously being proven to help “brain health.”
A European Review of Aging and Physical Activity study from July 2019 concluded that “Resistance exercises and resistance training evoked substantial functional brain changes, especially in the frontal lobe, which were accompanied by improvements in executive functions. Furthermore, resistance training led to lower white matter atrophy and smaller white matter lesion volumes.”
Now, they did add that there needs to be more research done and there are many other studies I’ll keep for another article, another time.
But the fact of the matter is this: strength training, in addition to all of these other benefits listed here, leaves little room to doubt as a MAJOR health benefiter for all ages. all brains.
30 – Dementia
This is a disease but I feel it should be in this section. For you older gamers looking to delay some potential dementia, strength training is for you. Prevention is key here.
Check out this followup study of 100 adults between 55-86 with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Those who did strength training twice a week showed major improvements cognitively in comparison to those that did not do strength training.
For those without any MCI, great, strength training still helps in prevention.
31 – Mood or Attitude
Mood is a word that can cover many variables. Issues like depression, anxiety, motivation, energy levels, emotions; all can fit into mood.
But as defined as a prevailing attitude, or quality of feeling at any given time, strength training can affect your mood during and after a workout. But how can resistance training affect your mood?
According to this article, J. Kip Mathews, Ph.D, a sport and exercise psychologist “When your body comes under stress or experiences pain, neurochemicals called endorphins are produced in the brain’s hypothalamus and pituitary gland. Endorphins, which are structurally similar to the drug morphine, are considered natural painkillers because they activate opioid receptors in the brain that help minimize discomfort. They can also help bring about feelings of euphoria and general well-being”.
It doesn’t end there.
32 – Depression or One Slice of the Whole Pie
Depression is a persistent mood disorder consisting of many symptoms like constant sadness or lack of motivation. Regarding the complicated science of depression, resistance training is just one of many preventers and reducers.
According to a study by JAMA Psychiatry in 2018, resistance exercise training significantly reduced depressive symptoms among adults regardless of health status, total prescribed volume of resistance exercise training (RET), or significant improvements in strength.
It is not an end all be all depression solution, but definitely can be a major part in helping.
33 – Reduce Anxiety or Less Stress Equals Less
Anxiety is defined on Google as a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome. In other words, the exact opposite of being present.
While meditation is my main suggested way of dealing with anxiety, strength training is another great way to learn how to manage it. In fact, a 2017 Sports Medicine analysis of 16 studies found that strength training improves anxiety symptoms.
This is just one of many similar studies. As listed throughout this article, strength training changes biological and psychological aspects of your body. Anxiety is no different.
“Life is not a spectator sport. If you’re going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you’re wasting your life.”
Jackie Robinson
34 – Distracter or Time To Get Away
How about a lighter reason before some big ego ones? Strength training is a discipline and something that takes time to do on a daily or weekly basis.
During that time, you are not at your job, not playing that game, not needing to deal with family, friends, social networks, or whatever, you name it. You don’t even need to worry about what you need to get back and do in-game.
Your strength training can be a great distracter of thinking too much during the time you are doing it. It’s an escape and a damn good one for your health.
Advice: put whatever is going on in your life on the side when you can, specifically when working out. Be present, and enjoy it.
You will be back in your everyday life in no time so take advantage of your time away.
35 – Public Perception or What Others Think
No one wants to care what others think, but most often, we do. It would be impossible to describe what is considered a culturally acceptable appearance and what isn’t. Unfortunately, celebrity, marketing, and media often define this, together, at least publicly.
One thing is certain, people who look fit are often viewed differently than those who are not. I’m not agreeing with it, I’m just presenting the information.
Strength training will improve the public perception of you, even if it’s ego and therefore shallow. If this is unimportant to you, great! If it is, you are human!
There is nothing wrong with getting a little more confidence through strength training your body and people noticing. As a gamer, it is especially nice to break the stereotype of out of shape, overweight gamer. This is directly related to self perception.
36 – Self Perception or What You Think
Through strength training, your body can change and therefore your own image of yourself can change. For many, you may be stronger, thinner, and happier. Happier due to those things, happier due to having more confidence.
Body image dissatisfaction relates to public perception, even if it’s jaded. Your idea on how you should look is not the same as others, yet you may feel it is. You may think others are looking at your appearence judgmentally, yet you are just fine how you are.
While the root of this is not cured by strength training, it will help temporarily, especially from the domino effect mentioned above.
37 – Empowerment or Overcoming Mental Obstacles
As you get stronger, more fit, more disciplined, your confidence on overcoming mental obstacles will grow and keep growing. You set goals, you achieve them, you stay with the program you joined, and sweat through it.
When you don’t quit, when you keep pushing, you realize that you can overcome anything that you put your mind to. You become empowered through strength training.
And it starts transcending past just exercise. You become empowered in all you do.
38 – Better Focus or Clearing the Fog
As you progress and continue on your physical fitness journey, you will be constantly improving your focus during and likely after you exercise.
At Positive Psychology, Juliette Tocino-Smith, MSc. says that “because physical activity improves memory and learning, it also activates different parts of the brain and enables the release of the BDNF chemical and norepinephrine neurotransmitters; these increase alertness, concentration, and energy.”
This is what meditation does, too. In fact, it is no different than a meditation in many ways.
You choose to focus or concentrate, and become quite aware of your body and what you are doing to it. This, in turn, helps in form and performance. Focusing will also improve as you practice it, improving concentration outside of the training.
In a Self article, Exercise physiologist and ACE-certified personal trainer Pete McCall, C.S.C.S. says “When you see somebody focused on what they’re doing, you see a tremendous difference [in performance]. It’s kind of like a form of meditation. If you focus on the muscles that you’re using, you just become more in tune with what your body is doing.”
Strength Training CAN Change Even More
We are not stopping right yet, we have four more reasons to go! These last four don’t fit into any specific sections but each is important in its own right. So, let’s get to it.
39 – Sports or Git Gud at Physical Activities
It is undebatable that strength training benefits most sports and physical activities you may do. You name the game, and there will be exercises that will help you increase your ability and skill, physically and mentally.
The benefits you get in sports or any physical activities also play a role in your competitive or non-competitive gaming. But will be most obvious in day to day activities like walking the dog, using the stairs, getting in and out of your vehicle, or any other physical movements.
40 – Increase Energy Levels or Hello, Yay!
You may have heard that strength training can help increase your energy levels. If not, well it can. But how?
According to this article, strength training grows mitochondria and capillary networks as well as increasing the efficiency of the heart and lungs. Since muscles use oxygen to make energy, over time, strength training will increase your cell mitochondria. It will also increase the number of capillaries.
Regarding your heart and lungs, exercise makes them more effective at putting oxygen into the bloodstream and moving it to the muscles. Both cardio and resistance training can do this.
The better physical efficiently you have, the more energy you’ll have technically. Nuff said. Now what will you do with that extra energy?
41 – Sleep Quality or Quantity or Both
Contributing to many things above, sleep is a vital part of health and its importance is all too often ignored. For strength training, sleep is where the tissue repair and muscle growth takes place. But this is about WHY you should strength train.
So, the second to last reason you should strength train, the big number 41, is that it can improve both your sleep quality AND your quantity. According to Sleep.org, this includes how fast you fall asleep, the frequency of waking up throughout the night, how much you sleep, etc.
I won’t go into the issues that gaming can cause with your sleep here. But you should know that if you game right before you are planning on sleeping, it could affect your quality whether you strength train or not.
Nonetheless, improving your sleep will substantially improve your health.
So, if sleep is a problem for you, add it to the many reasons you should strength train. I can think of some others, including a few, or more than a few, actually. Maybe I’ll list them somewhere, and then finish with the next reason.
42 – Longer Lifespan or Duh Says This Whole Article
After 41 pretty strong arguments as to why one should strength train, you may have picked up a whiff or two on how it may extend your lifespan. Since almost every section is related to this, living longer is kind of an obvious one so I will go even further.
A study published in 2018 in the Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences found that people with low muscle strength are 50 percent more likely to die earlier.
Lead researcher on the study Kate Duchowny says that “Maintaining muscle strength throughout life, and especially in later life, is extremely important for longevity and aging independently.” Duchowny said a growing body of research has indicated that muscle strength may be an even more important predictor of overall health and longevity than muscle mass.
There it is.
Strength Training WILL Change Your Life
So, here is what I want you to do, I want you to take that reason and all the other reasons to strength train covered in this article and decide if it seems worthwhile.
I hope you can see there are an abundance of reasons that statistically will keep you healthier and alive longer. I’m not saying you will live forever, but if your heart is lighter than a feather, you may.
I started with how strength training benefits soft and hard tissues and prevents and helps back issues. Then its importance to weight loss and regulation, disease prevention, reduction, and maintenance, and preventing gaming cause repetitive strain injuries.
We went inside the brain and the mind, then finished with the remaining, energy levels and sleep improvements. Strength training can increase your quality of life through all these things.
And that is the point, to be healthier AND live longer! That’s the true most ultimate question.
Deep Thought, that dang super computer wasn’t telling me to write 42 reasons why everyone should strength train. It was telling me to write 42 reasons to be healthier and live longer.
And now you have them. But are they enough to convince you to spend at least a couple times a week doing any strength training?
I guess you will see.
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