It’s a shame more people aren’t including strength exercises in their fitness regimen, as they can have remarkable health benefits. For starters, the moving parts of the body: muscles and joints, along with the bones to which they are attached, become stronger with proper exercise and better support each other. This, of course, provides greater protection against injury and gives the human body a firmer, tighter and more toned appearance.

Strength training exercise is also the number one best weight loss tool on the planet. If a person is overweight, he often believes that he has a body fat problem. In fact, they have a ‘undermuscled’ problem. Without sufficient muscle development and maintenance of activity, the body’s metabolism, its fat-burning machinery, slows to a crawl.

This means less fuel (calories) is burned for energy and more is stored as fat weight. Most people think that a diet of some kind is going to solve the problem, but no amount of low-calorie dieting is going to fix the underlying reason why one is overweight when metabolism is the main cause. There is only one way to fix this.

Yes, you guessed it, it’s a strength training program suitable for rebuilding and restoring precious muscle tissue that has been left to wither with disuse. Don’t be fooled into thinking that any type of movement or exercise will restore muscle tissue because it won’t. Low intensity endurance types of activity will not change body composition (muscle to fat ratio) and that is what needs to happen to correct the problem of being overweight.

Body composition is the best measure of the effectiveness of your exercise program. It can be done at your local gym or fitness center and will tell you how much body fat you have in relation to how much muscle tissue you have. Obviously, you want less fat and more muscle, as the key to good health is so much more than fighting the bathroom scale.

You need good quality toned muscle tissue if you want good health and you also need good quality toned muscle if you want to lose weight long term. Weak and flabby muscles will never give you a healthy body weight as you would have to eat food that would go through the eye of a needle and that is not healthy eating.

So, if you have some weight to lose, think about revving up your metabolic furnace instead of blaming your sluggish metabolism. “I’m gaining weight because my metabolism has slowed down, so it’s not my fault.” But people don’t gain weight because their metabolism is slowing down, their metabolism is slowing down because their muscle tissue is being lost.

For every pound of muscle you lose, you lose a portion of your metabolism burning less fuel and storing more as fat weight. Just reverse the situation and watch the opposite happen. Rebuild your muscle tissue and watch your health improve in every way, including losing that excess body fat.

Don’t get sucked into the old belief that you’re getting enough physical activity each day to be healthy. Perhaps 30 or 50 years ago this might have been true, but not in this modern sedentary world where most of us sit 80 percent of our day in one chair or another.

When challenged by proper exercise, such as strength training, your muscles, bones, cells, and tissues are forced to continually renew themselves. This is the closest thing we have to the Fountain of Youth. Nothing else comes close to being able to sweep out old, degenerating cells and rebuild younger, stronger, healthier new tissue so you look and feel like a million bucks no matter your age.