Well sort of. Not exactly. But, they are awesome.

Resistance training is the best, most effective thing to improve almost anything.

I’m not saying it will cure cancer. Just that it is extremely effective to help cancer sufferers.

Or diabetes, or heart disease, or obesity, or insert health condition here.

What about where I hang out, pain and injury?

Back pain – resistance training

Knee injury – resistance training

Shoulder pain – resistance training

Complex regional pain syndrome – resistance training

Now this doesn’t mean you need to go and get your copy of “Pumping Iron” and mimic Arnold Schwarzenegger circa early 80s with the headband and the biceps on biceps.

Your body weight is resistance. You don’t need to be in a gym.

It just means you have to push and pull and it needs to be difficult.

The strongest person and the weakest person in the world can find something heavy enough and push it around.

Now, why does it work so well?

Resistance training allows you to pack a lot of load into a short space of time.

There are big demands and adaptations that occur because of this. Hormonal, neural and muscle/tendon changes that all allow you to handle more stuff, better.

Plus you might get some bonus aesthetic benefits.

The main thing you are aiming for is to be capable of more than you need on a week to week basis. This is something I talk about EVERY DAY. If you have more of a gap between what you need and what you are capable of, you more likely to avoid pain and injury. You can handle unexpected increases in load more easily.

Who are the people that should be utilising these benefits? If you said meathead young men, you would be wrong. They’re just the group most likely.

It’s almost the opposite. The older you are, the weaker you feel, the more injuries and pain you have had, the more unfit you are the greater scope of benefit can be gained from resistance training.

Lean muscle mass and bone mineral density decrease as we get older. Resistance training helps both of these. In fact as you get older, doing the same thing means you’ll actually get worse. You need to do more to stay the same.

So, don’t be put off by images of weirdos with more muscles than brains kissing their biceps and grunting like pigs. Just start, continue and feel the benefit of being a more weaponised version of yourself.

Let us know if you need a hand to get started

Until next time

Dave