Weight Lifting

Need a mental lift? Weight Lift! When we think of health related fitness, we tend to focus our attention on aerobic exercise. According to the 2018 Physical Guidelines for Americans, 2nd Edition, two or more days of resistance training is recommended. ​Including resistance training in your workouts is good for your mental health and body.

 

The benefits to weight training include decreased anxiety (Strickland, J.C, & Smith M.A 2014) , helps ease the symptoms of depression, increases your self esteem, improves sleeps, and helps with working on your breathing. For example, when doing a dead lift, you want to take a deep breath at the bottom of the lift and when you're near completion or when complete the lift is when you exhale. This mimics the idea of finally being able to breathe after you finish a difficult task.