There are many benefits a person can enjoy when performing weight-bearing exercise on a regular basis. The obvious benefits are stronger muscles and a toned body, but this type of exercise offers many other advantages as well. Weight-bearing exercise helps build bones, build muscle, and has a positive effect on many health conditions. This type of exercise also helps reduce a person’s risk of injury. It may even help people to lose weight faster.
Many people do weight-bearing exercises in order to enjoy a toned physique. Working out in this manner can replace flabby, fatty parts of the body with toned muscle. It also helps build muscle strength, boost coordination, and improve a person’s overall balance. As a person build’s his muscles, he can count on not only a more defined look for muscular areas, but also less risk of accidental injury. Adding muscle mass works to make the joints, bones, tendons, and ligaments hardier and more capable of avoiding injury.
Weight-bearing exercise also builds and strengthens a person’s bones. When a person does weight-bearing exercise, his muscles pull on his bones as he does them. This helps make the bones both stronger and more dense. Stronger bones mean less chance of injury and can even translate into a reduced risk of osteoporosis, which is a disease marked by brittle, weakened bones.
Often, people think of dieting and aerobic exercise when they want to lose weight. Weight-bearing exercise can also play a role in weight loss, however. Muscle requires the body to expend more energy to maintain than fat does. This means a person with more muscle may burn more calories in the course of daily living than someone who has more fat would burn. Additionally, a person who does weight-bearing exercise may be able to eat more without gaining weight than a person who restricts his workouts to other forms of exercise.
An individual hoping to achieve better health and stamina may find weight-bearing exercises helpful. Exercising with weights helps increase a person’s overall stamina. It may also help slow the aging process, especially if a person also does exercises that are good for the cardiovascular system, such as walking and running. Since those who do weight-bearing exercises regularly tend to have leaner bodies, they may also have a decreased risk of developing cancer, diabetes, and many other health problems that are associated with being overweight.