We all know that diet and exercise form the basis of a healthy lifestyle. And we also all know that we should be eating out of various food groups every day ” and preferably with fresh ingredients. And we also know that we need regular exercise in our daily routine. Food and drink are fuel to our bodies. But few of us know that exercise is just as important! If you want to live a healthier life you will have to incorporate all of these things into your daily routine.

However, there is one important component that needs to be included in order to build that healthy, fit body that youve always wanted, and that thing is strength training. Strength training can reduce your body fat, increase your lean muscle mass, and help you burn calories more efficiently. But what does all of this really mean?

Its quite easy: one pound of muscle burns about 6 calories a day. But a pound of fat only burns two calories a day. So the more muscle we have, the more calories we burn ” easy isnt it? But how long does it take to get more muscle? Well, the average person needs about 3 to 4 months to build 3 to 5 pounds of muscle. And this all depends on gender, exercise program, diet and of course your genetics. If you put it in this perspective: if you could gain 12 pounds of muscle in a years time by exercise, strength training and diet ” you will burn off an extra 72 calories a day. If you calculate how many calories this is a year youll be quite surprise: 26,000 calories per year!

It takes about 3,500 calories to burn a pound of fat. This means that by adding strength training to your daily routine, you can lose 7 ” pounds of fat over the course of year with no additional effort on your part! This might not sound like a lot, but when you couple this with your regular daily activities, diet, and aerobic exercise, the potential to remarkable body change is there. But best of all, you will have developed a routine that has created permanent weight loss!

We all know that the older we get the less muscle we have and the more fat we get in our bodies. Thats why its so important to burn as many calories and build up those muscles. You have to make sure you replace the fat with muscles so that you dont increase the amount of fat in your body as you get older.

Strength training has a lot of other advantages: Your bones get stronger because they are stressed during exercise. Also the density increases because of this. And the great thing about this is that you have less chance of getting osteoporosis! You have less chance of injury, look better, feel better and more self assured ” surely this is a win-win situation all round! You also have less chance of being depressed and you will notice that you sleep a lot better than you ever have before.

You dont have to have a gym membership to incorporate strength training into your routine. You can use free weights like dumb bells, resistance tubing (which is relatively inexpensive), or just use your own body weight.