Mens Health Blog. Medical Blog

Lifting weights makes you stronger because your muscles will adapt to the extra stress you’re putting on them. So you look better and you feel better. You’re also healthier, in ways that a lot of people don’t normally associate with muscle building.

For example, strength training builds lean muscle mass, which helps to burn more calories. In doing so, it helps to burn fat, which, of course, helps to maintain an appropriate body weight. And trained muscles metabolize glucose much better and lower your insulin resistance. That helps prevent diabetes.

Where strength training really does its job is making you feel more alive. Think about how much dedicated gym rats like to talk about how great they feel. (Some of them, you may have noticed, talk about it a little too much.) Then think about how much other men talk about how lousy they feel as the years go by. Strength training can turn that gym-rat attitude into an age-proof lust for life.

“If you don’t want to lose a lot of your muscle power as you get past 40 or 50, strength training can have a big effect,” Taranta says. “Without it, you won’t be able to do things as well, so your activity level will decrease. This can lead to heart problems, cholesterol problems, hypertension -all of that.” Here’s how to get the best benefits from strength training.

Shock your system. Lifting weights once in a while when you’re in the mood won’t get the job done. “You have to shock your muscular system on a regular basis or else muscles will lose their strength,” Dr. Baechle says. How often is that? Well, you need to give your muscles a day off after working them with weights, but you shouldn’t let them rest more than three days before “shocking” them again, according to Dr. Baechle. “Two days a week will work,” he says. “Monday and Thursday or Tuesday and Friday are fairly common systems, but three times a week (for example, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday) is a little better.”

Work the major muscles. Those would be your chest, back, shoulders, legs, abdomen, and arms. Some movements with weights work the entire group; others pick out individual muscles, such as your biceps. “Try to do one exercise for each major muscle group to get a balanced effect,” Dr. Baechle advises.

Hit your number. For general health purposes, repeating each exercise 12 to 15 times without stopping is the ideal, according to Dr. Baechle. “That seems to be a number where you can really concentrate on the technique involved, on the breathing and rhythm, and on range of motion, without being so concerned about how much weight you’re lifting,” he says.

Learn to fail. The amount of weight you lift varies with the exercise, of course, but the rule of thumb is that the last time through the movement-in this case, say, the 15th repetition-should be the last you could possibly do. That, in weight room talk, is called working to failure, a case where failure is a good thing. Start light. If making it to 15 repetitions is too easy, add weight. If you can’t make it to 12, lighten up, says Dr. Baechle.

Do it once and for all. When you finish your 15 repetitions of any exercise, you’ve done one set of that exercise. If you rest and do it 15 more times, you’ve done two sets. How many sets should you do? That question starts arguments across the great schism in the church of iron about the relative benefits of multiple sets over a single set. But there’s fairly solid agreement that for the beginner interested in general health there’s no need for time-consuming extra sets. “One set’s enough when you’re starting out,” Dr. Baechle says. “But for continued improvement, try to increase the number of sets and weight loads as you get stronger.”

Get organized. There’s a reason that you see those guys walking around the gym making notes between exercises. They’re keeping track of what they did and how much they did of it. Catch-as-catch-can workouts are better than nothing, but you need a set routine in order to chart and make progress. “Your body really needs to know what you’re expecting of it,” Dr. Baechle says. “When you keep changing the exercises, it compromises the muscles’ ability to adapt and become stronger. Staying with the same routine for about a month provides an ideal opportunity for muscles to adapt to training.”

Besides, there’s something encouraging about being able to quantify your progress. “Part of the fun of training is recording the results of your workout,” Dr. Baechle says. “It’s reinforcing to be able to look back and see how much weight you are using-that is, how much stronger you are.”

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Tags: General health

These are more difficult to cost out. Immunization against the infectious diseases such as polio, rubella, measles, diphtheria, mumps, whooping cough and smallpox has been of interest to governments all over the western world because these diseases are highly contagious, cause a provable disruption to society and are relatively easily prevented. Although any one of these diseases causes very little risk of serious life-long impairment or fatality to any single individual, an epidemic affecting perhaps hundreds of thousands of people really does cost society a lot of money. The costs for society of preventing these illnesses are small yet the benefits are great. However, the benefits to society in the case of certain immunisable diseases, unless a very large proportion of the population is immunized, can be small. This applies especially to diseases in which there is considerable ‘herd immunity’. After this crucial point is reached there is really not much point spending yet more money immunizing the last 10 per cent of the population.

A good example of how to work out what is worth doing in the public health arena was the different ways in which German measles vaccine was used in the US and the UK, when it was first licensed in 1969. In the US children between 1 and 12 were inoculated whilst in the UK only girls between 11 and 14 were offered the vaccine. The benefits of the programme were defined to include the saving of the costs that would have been incurred in the treatment of the disease and its complications had it not been prevented. Work loss was also taken into account. The direct costs were the expenditure on the vaccine, its administration and the treatment of vaccine complications. By 1972 it was obvious that giving the vaccine had economic advantages at any age but that the most cost-effective way of using it was to offer it at the age of 12 to girls only, rather than to all children at age 6 or younger, as had been done in the US.

This raises an interesting general point in that it would be ideal to be able to prevent many diseases -whether they are communicable or not-yet as a society that already spends so much on health we have to be highly selective about what we spend money on. However rich a society its resources are not endless, and starting a preventive programme means shifting priority from other preventive programmes, acute care or even from non-health activities. This puts a considerable burden on those who are planning to introduce preventive programmes because they have to be able to justify what they do in terms of value for money. Unfortunately, the crisis-intervention sort of medicine we are all used to has rarely been subjected to such rigorous scrutiny-often with dire results.

Another example of the value of public health measures in the preventive field is the fluoridation of water to prevent tooth decay. Governments, whether local or national, tend to support water fluoridation because it is by far the cheapest way of ensuring that vulnerable people get enough fluoride. Cost-benefit analyses have shown that the fluoridation of water saves up to twenty to forty times its cost by dramatically reducing the incidence of tooth decay.

Environmental control of air and water pollution is the nearest we come in this century to the environmental problems faced in the last. A great deal of evidence has been accumulated to show that a reduction in air pollution would lead to a significant reduction in illness and death rates in urban areas. Using current costs for reducing air pollution there is no doubt that the benefits would outweigh them.

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Tags: General health