Benefits to Strength and Conditioning Training

What's the first thing you think of when you hear the phrase “strength and conditioning”? Is it that guy in the gym who looks insane lifting over 300 pounds, the training that Olympians used to get ready for their competitions, or could you be connecting it with any of the CrossFit workouts you have seen.

Either way, strength and conditioning programs don’t have to be so aggressive to create the result you are looking for. These examples are extremes and are some the peak benefits of what strength and conditioning can do for you. Let's take a look at what these programs can do for the everyday person.

What is Strength and conditioning

Strength and conditioning exercises use sports science to improve the quality of your movements and because everyone moves, we can all enjoy this style of training. Sports program's like to focus on this because it can help their athletes improve their strength, power, and speed, but there’re programs designed to help the elderly get off the couch or improve their balance.

The results of any strength and conditioning program vary from person to person, depending on their goals, because everyone has a different starting point. Aside from improving your performance, you can use this training to prevent an injury from occurring.

Living our lives, we develop some bad habits. Some bad habits put the body into positions that increase the risk of injury. Strength and conditioning training uses movement to correct these bad habits.

How training can help

One of the problems you may face as you get older is low bone density. When your bones become brittle, it's easier for them to break. Strength and conditioning training helps to build bone in certain cases but mainly it slows down the rate of bone loss.

Studies have found that putting stress on bones can activate the cells responsible for forming bone and that is what this style of training in designed to do.

With people working from home, you would think that they would not be sitting as much, but what seems to have happened is that employees have switched their cubicles for home offices. Sitting for so long everyday leads to poor posture which Strength and conditioning training can help improve.

Most personal trainers will do a posture check during their first assessment to see what exercises the client needs to do. When you improve your posture, your body will work better, including the circulatory and respiration systems.

Exercise feels great

Every time you exercise, the body releases a hormone called serotonin, which handles stabilizing your mood, making you feel happier. The same is true every time you use a strength and conditioning program.

Some people will say that the best feeling after a workout is a runner's higher but I prefer the mood I am in after a good lifting session. If you are looking to improve your mood, there’re studies that say how exercising routinely can make you feel as good as taking a low grade medication, depending on your condition.

More than one

The main reason that people begin a strength and conditioning routine is to build muscle, but did you know that these routines can also help you burn calories? Strength training helps you increase your muscle mass and muscle burns more calories while at rest.

This gives your metabolism more to do. The increase in lean muscle has other health benefits as well such as decreasing the risk of insulin resistance, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and obesity to name a .

Strength and conditioning training can help you in countless ways, which is why more people are starting their own programs.

Make it fun

Like anything else in life, when you put the time in and begin to understand what you are doing, the activity becomes more fun. Your motivation begins to build because you feel more confident in what you are doing, and this helps in injury prevention.

Knowing where your body is supposed to be when you are doing movements helps you stay safe during the workout. This is a positive cycle to be in. You build confidence because you understand the motion, and you enjoy what you are doing because you feel confident.

If the unfortunate were to happen and you did injury yourself while exercising, the recovery time may be shorter for those who were on a strength and conditioning program. Because these programs are designed to have your body move , the more you exercise like this the more your body becomes accustomed to where it's supposed to go.

When you injure yourself, your body knows how to fix the problem quicker because you trained it too already. With an increase in muscle, your recovery time could also decrease, and it will make it harder for you to hurt yourself in the future.

Final Thoughts

Strength and conditioning exercises have loads of different goals, depending on what you plan on using it for. My goal for this article was to inform others that these of exercises are not for those looking to lift as much weight as they can, but to show that there're other results to doing strength and conditioning workouts.

I know of a trainer that had a 90-year-old nun as a client and after some time she said that she had never felt better after doing these exercises. It goes to show you that it doesn’t matter who you are, anyone can do strength and conditioning exercises and get the results that they are looking for.