I keep seeing fitness professionals celebrating these new ACSM guidelines as a major improvement on previous advice. Certainly the new version gets more specific about how to achieve different benefits of training (like strength versus muscle size), but it also tells us how not to overthink the details. I’ll give the highlights below, and then you can read the press release and the full list of guidelines.
I’ve previously written about the benefits of gaining muscle mass, which include improvements to your metabolism, overall health, and the ability to stay active and independent as you get older. The ACSM writes in its paper that resistance training (its preferred term for what I call strength training) has positive effects on health outcomes, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, depression, and sleep quality.
How much strength training to plan for
I find that some of the most interesting things in the new ACSM guidelines are where it tells us what not to worry about. According to the evidence the authors have reviewed, there’s a lot of stuff that isn’t conclusively supported, and you can safely stop worrying about it:
Instability training isn’t better for balance. You don’t need to stand on unstable surfaces to train your balance; balance gets better as people get stronger, regardless of whether they used stable or unstable surfaces to train.
Beginner/intermediate/advanced routines aren’t needed. The same basic advice applies to everyone, the ACSM concludes. That doesn’t mean you have to train the same way as an advanced lifter as you did as a beginner, but it also means you can just keep doing what works for you as long as it’s working.
Progressive overload isn’t always needed. This will be a shocker to a lot of fitness buffs! Gradually increasing the difficulty of your workouts is a way to get stronger, but it’s not always necessary to get the basic health benefits. That said, if you start out with very light or easy exercises at the beginning, you’ll need to increase the difficulty to make sure you’re training hard enough.
How to meet your strength training goals, according to the ACSM
Here’s the basic breakdown that the ACSM gives for different goals:
For muscle gain (hypertrophy), aim to get 10 sets of strength exercises per muscle group, per week.
If you’ve never thought of these things separately, let me break them down:
Strength is pretty much what it sounds like—the ability to handle heavy weights or to apply a lot of force. The stronger you are, the easier it will be to carry a child or a bag of dog food or cement (to put it into real-world terms).
You can work on all three of these areas by using a variety of exercises and loads, but you may find it simplest to focus on one of them at a time.
Hence then, the article about six strength training rules you can safely ignore was published today ( ) and is available on Live Hacker ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
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