Staying active and maintaining strong musculature becomes increasingly important as you get older to prevent chronic health problems and injuries from falls. The positive fact in this is everyone no matter your age is able to perform exercises to help with their general health and strength improvement through their own personalised exercise program.

With the fitness industry growing at its current rate the variety of training methods available to us today is outstanding. Gaining more muscle through resistance training has many benefits, and is essential if you want to prevent weak bones, muscle loss, limited range of motion or flexibility or just general aches and pains around your body.

Unknown to most, strength training can in fact be more important for older individuals as opposed to aerobic training. Purely on the fact they are more susceptible to falls. Generally people forget that strength training is in fact an aerobic exercise because in order for us to access our cardio vascular system, you have to perform mechanical work with your muscles. Unfortunately this is a fact that not many people are familiar with today.

The growing cause is with inactivity comes muscle loss and with that the inevitable strength loss. With that in mind it is important for us to remember we must straighten our body before we strengthen it.

Walk before we run

For instance many people are guilty of grabbing the heavier weights at the gym because we want to ‘burn more calories’, ’get fitter faster’ or ‘push yourself to limit’. The horrible reality with most of these cases is these methods not performed correctly are more detrimental to our health. This problem is not limited to age or gender. It is important for us to limit this problem now as with age comes faster muscle loss and our ability to straighten our body before we strengthen it diminishes.

Help & Guidance

With the right guidance from a professionally qualified personal trainer in Abu Dhabi all of these problems can be avoided. To help you with this here are some helpful facts:

Posture is key (feet are grounded, toes pointing straight ahead, hips are neutral, core activated, shoulders back and chin up).
Weights come later (Once your able to perform the movement of the exercise safely and efficiently then you can add weight for improvement).
Exercise specific (Make sure the exercise you are performing is specific to you and your health.
For instance if you are prone to lower back issues you don’t want to be dead lifting heavy weights).

Safety (Ensure the equipment your using and area your exercising in is safe)

Strength training is a key element to our fitness and it is our duty as fitness professionals to educate our clients these key facts.

Learn your exercise movement first, ensure your position and performance is correct then increase your resistance by adding weight or perform a more complex exercise.

The human body is a complex functioning machine and with the correct training can become extremely powerful. So lets ensure we keep it that way.