THE BENEFITS AND REAL-WORLD APPLICATIONS OF STRENGTH AND RESISTANCE TRAINING

By Harvey Simmons

We all enjoy lifting weights in the gym but have you ever stopped to think about the benefits of resistance training besides changing your physical appearance?

Resistance training has an abundance of other benefits and applications to everyday life that you may not even realise!

For example, the prowler push. A fantastic piece of equipment for training your lower body, but have you ever thought about how it might help you push a trolley full of heavy shopping? Or how about rearranging some heavy furniture such as a sofa in your house?

Let’s take the deadlift as another example. A brilliant exercise for training your posterior chain, but how might it help you in real life? Any activity where you are crouching down to lift something up, be that a box, your child, some shopping, will all become easier through performing deadlifts. 

This is something we like to call ‘Functional Training’. Functional training simply refers to any training method that readies your body for daily activities. 

There are many different examples of functional training that you can perform in order to make your life easier outside the gym. As well as this, you can personalise your training to make it more functional for you.

Can you think of a common day to day task that you sometimes struggle with? It could be a household chore or something you are not strong enough to move or lift?

Now can you think of an exercise that trains the same muscles and movement patterns as this exercise? If not, there will be one!

If you have an activity that you struggle with and you would like to improve your performance for, one of our personal trainers will be more than happy to help you with some functional exercises personalised towards you.

Everyone has different reasons why they use the gym, but improving how functional we are should be something that we all strive towards.