The background music in this post is my daughter Ana, practicing on the piano. She’s a brilliant musician with a great ear. The song itself is from a classic movie about Philippe Petit, the man who walked between the trade center towers of New York on a high-wire – a secret mission that no one knew about until he was up there, dazzling us with his courage and commitment to life itself. Because, as Philip put it, “I just had to do it.” Likely a call from his guides who knew it would inspire those who discovered his story to follow their own dreams and callings with the same kind of relentless pursuit.
“If you want something, nothing is impossible.”
The quiet discipline of strength training can help you get there…
john c ashworth in the home gym. #redshoefitnessdiaries
I remember when I first discovered the true and immediate transformation that one exercise session has on your physiology. I mean for 72 hours or so, you become a completely different human being.
Your blood sugar stabilizes. Your bad cholesterol goes down and your good cholesterol goes up.
You rid yourself of cortisol, epinephrine and norepinephrine. The stress chemicals that seep into you and your soul each and every time you experience even just a little bit of stress. Cortisol in particular can be devastating because it promotes storage of extra fat in your belly, where it can more easily go to work on wreaking havoc for your blood sugar and arteries.
Exercise is simply amazing in its ability to produce an immediate elixir to this cascade of calamity in your blood and body.
Exercise in the form of strength training is even more powerful on its own and that’s what I plan to cover in this series of posts.
Let’s start today with a simple list of strength training benefits and that way as I add more of the story for each, you can check back to this post and click the live links to further explanation and elaboration.
enhancing post coronary performance – after a heart attack or some other ishemic or disease event related to your heart directly
reisting diabetes – by helping stablizize your blood sugar by demanding more from your muscles and body
increasing bone density
decreasing physical discomfort – strength training is terrific for your joints, as one example
enhancing mental health
revitalizing muscle cells – which means more of you is alive and well and working and thriving
Reversing physical frailty
combating cancer
enhanced athletic performance from your tennis and golf games to whatever it is you like to do to release your inner bohemian athlete
Take a quick second right now to bookmark this post. I’m committed to this list and have been excited to start this series of posts for quite some time now. I’m only one nomad, so I can’t get to everything at once 🙂
Before I go, I do want to leave you with a quick thought or two about how strength training helps you stay leaner over the years. Especially when you’re over 50. And again, that podcast I keep mentioning is a good one. I’ll just include it again here too…
The science on the subject shows us the critical cause-and-affect relationship between muscle loss and fat gain. You can refer back to the podcast I did on this subject if you like. I always like to clearly emphasize this point when discussing the benefits of strength training because on the surface, the numbers don’t seem that devastating, but when you dive into the details, you will see that the muscle you lose each decade is one of the primary things working against you when it comes to staying leaner as you age.
Unless you perform some type of muscle strengthening activity, you will lose about 5 pounds (2.3 kg) of lean (muscle) weight every decade of adult life (Frontera et al. 2000). This reduced your resting metabolic rate by 3% per decade (Keys et al. 1973).
This reduced the number of calories you burn each day whether you are exercising or not, and causes your body to store more of those unburned calories as fat.
Remember, resting metabolism accounts for approximately 70 percent of the calories used every day, as such, metabolic slowdown is a major factor in fat gain during aging (Wolfe 2006).
A great article I found along the way. This research was led by one of my favorite long-time scientists for strength training, Wayne Westcott, PhD.
I started this process in the late summer last year. I was getting too heavy and too lethargic and my family wasn’t shy about telling me what they thought. And they were right. 🤨😃😎
So, I got back to work and I’ve been a fitness professional my whole life so I knew exactly what I needed to do. I also felt compelled to begin sharing the experience with all of you; and I appreciate all the feedback I’ve received from YOU along the way. We’re just getting started! 🏋️♂️🤙
Fitness is a lifelong journey. It won’t always go perfectly and you won’t always be perfect and if one more instagram promo pops up in front of me with someone’s useless before and after photos and their story about how they have all the secrets, I think I’m going to puke. It’s all a lot of non-sense. YOU have to make a decision to do this. YOU have to make a decision to commit. YOU have to decide that YOU are worth it and then you have to be willing to keep coming back! ⚡️⚡️⚡️
You can subscribe to my latest series of 10-minute workouts here (http://theashflash.com/subscribe
But remember, I have no secrets. Only inspiration and expertise to share with you! You decide. ⚡️🏋️♂️🤩
Big thanks to @keanureysoto for the move that inspired this post.
Carl Ashworth was the first to try this workout and he absolutely loved it. I agree. I love it too. Hear what Carl had to say and discover the benefits of this workout in this short podcast description…
