Strength

Strength is the ability to exert maximum force by the muscles that control particular body movements. It can be enhanced by weight training, resistance–training etc.

Why strength is so important for us?
Your body requires some strength for doing simple movements like walking, lifting your hands and legs even for holding a pen you require some strength. Imagine that one fine day you discover that you cannot lift a bucket full of water. This is where your muscular strength plays an important role and doing some special exercise only can increase muscular strength.

What type of exercises one should do for increasing strength?
Resistance training is the best form of exercise to increase your strength. There are different forms of resistance training free hand exercises, barbell and dumbbell exercises and exercises on machines.

How one can judge his/her strength?
There are some simple tests to judge your strength.
Judging your upper body strength
If you are going to any gym, try to push the bench press machine. Start with 30% of your body weight. You have only 3 chances. Then divide the weight that you have lifted by your body weight it should be above 1. Or if you are not going to any gym a simple test can be taken start doing push–ups or pull ups and judge your strength.
Judging your lower body strength
For lower body strength try to push leg press machine again use the same formula and judge your leg strength. It should come around 1.68 for men and 1.30 for ladies. For those who are not going to any gym.

What exactly means by increase in strength?
When you start exercising the muscle tissue is broken down. With the help of good nutrition body repairs and rebuilds the tissue in the rest period. There is an increase in muscle fibers and the muscle increases in size and its ability to perform.

What is resistance training?
It means working against gravitational force or force of your body weight or machines. Muscle tissues break only when there is any overload and overload can be given while doing resistance training for e.g. working on machines or doing some free hand exercises with free weights.

How many repetitions one should do to increase strength?
For strength, building one should do low repetitions and higher weights. (about 8 to 10 repetitions and 2 to 3 sets if you are a beginner).

What should be the duration for a beginner?
To start with, one can do muscle strength and endurance exercises thrice in a week for at least 20 to 45 minutes.

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