Weight lifting strengthens your bones and muscles thus improving balance, posture and muscular endurance. It also helps you tone your muscles and get that shape and firmness that you want.

Weight lifting helps prevent injuries, making you less prone to injuries on the lower back or other bone ailments such as osteoporosis, a bone disease prevalent among women. That’s right! Weight lifting is not just for men that’s why women must see the importance of lifting weights too. Additionally, lifting weights enhances your immune system, decreases your resting heart rate, lowers the risk of developing adult onset diabetes, and lowers the risk for developing colon cancer due to the decrease of gastrointestinal transit time.

Weight lifting gives you more energy. Stronger muscles would mean easier and more productive activities for you to do. Lifting weights also increases you basal metabolism causing you to burn more calories even after exercise.

Weight lifting has also proven to boost one’s confidence as well as elevate the mood, making you live your day in the most positive way!

Weight lifting can be as easy as ABC once you’ve worked your way around. However, no matter how long you have been lifting some weights, here are the basics that should be placed in mind and applied at all times.

It is a big MUST to warm up before you start your workout. Stretching and warming up are essential to make your muscles warm thus preventing any risk of injuries. Warm up may take 15-20 minutes with aerobic exercise included such as treadmill or cross trainer.

Cooling down after tour weight lifting routine is just as important, as this helps get rid of lactic acid build-up that may lead to muscle soreness. This also prevents blood pooling in your extremities causing you to faint or feel dizzy.

Some people tend to cheat in properly executing their weight lifting exercise. This happens especially when you’re lifting very heavy weights, wherein you use the poor form of execution in order to let the other muscle groups help do the lift. However, you have to do your exercise properly and not just for the sake of doing it if you really want to achieve your fitness goal.

Proper breathing is another weight lifting basic. Breathing allows sufficient oxygen supply to the muscles and the brain thus preventing the risk of blackout or stroke by aneurysm in extreme cases.

Weight lifting makes you excrete an ample amount of sweat which may lead to dehydration. Drink sufficient amounts of water even when not thirsty to ensure that your body gets the water replenishment that is needed.