Everybody knows that exercise is important for good health. But if you’re old, fat, and completely out of shape, you may figure, why bother?
You may think that you’re so far gone that exercising can’t help…certainly not the kind of easy workout that you could muster.
Here’s a surprise: New research shows that a single bout of exercise helps people who are completely out of shape every bit as much as it does highly trained athletes.
The study comes from the U.K.’s University of Birmingham’s School of Sport and Exercise Science. Researchers compared two groups of older men:[1]
- “Master athletes” who had exercised all their adult lives and excelled in sports.
- Novices who had never taken part in a sustained exercise regimen.
The participants performed a single weight-training exercise. The researchers took muscle biopsies from them two days before and two days after.
The researchers were surprised by the results…
They had thought that master athletes would have a superior ability to build muscle due to years of high-level physical fitness. But the out-of-shape novices had an equal muscle-building capacity. There was no difference in the way proteins developed in the muscles of the two groups.
Dr. Leigh Breen was the lead researcher. He said the study showed “it doesn’t matter if you have been a regular exerciser.” Even starting late in life “will help delay age-related frailty and muscle weakness.”[2]
The Best Exercise to Build Muscle
Dr. Breen remarked that you can improve muscle strength, “even outside of a gym setting through activities undertaken in (your) home.”
A great approach for this is high-intensity resistance training (HIRT).
You don’t need machines or weights to do it. Bodyweight exercises are enough. They build functional strength and have a low risk of injury.
Do these four exercises for a total body strength workout:
- Push-ups
- Pull-ups
- Squats
- Lunges
Do about 10 reps of each of these exercises, or as many as you can manage. Rest no more than 90 seconds between each set. Do the entire routine three times in a row for a complete workout. Shoot for at least two sessions a week.
For detailed instructions on how to do each exercise, go here.
The old adage “better late than never” applies to exercise as much as anything.
Editor’s Note: Readers of our monthly journal Independent Healing recently discovered the best way to get fast results from resistance exercise. To find out more, go HERE.
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[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31155637
[2]https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-08/uob-int082819.php