Forget lifting heavy – lifting for longer may be the secret to staying healthy. People should aim to clock up at least 90 minutes of strength training a week, a study has found.
Current UK guidelines say people should aim to do strength training, also called resistance training, at least two days a week.
How long that should last is unspecified, but experts suggest some people may be interpreting that as about 60 minutes. And surveys have found only a quarter of people in the UK are in fact doing any strength training at all twice weekly.
By contrast, the advice on aerobic exercise – the kind that gets your heart racing, like running – says it should be done for at least 150 minutes a week at moderate intensity, which would be half an hour, five days a week, for instance.
While guidelines used to focus on aerobic exercise, strength training, like lifting weights or doing squats and lunges, has recently become seen as more important, especially to help people avoid losing muscle as they get older.
Those who keep up more strength are less likely to die early, or to experience a range of health conditions such as heart disease. But it was unclear how much of this activity we should be doing.
Benefits linked to 120 minutes of strength training
“The prior studies mostly looked at the frequency of resistance training. But it missed how much in terms of duration people actually need,” said Dr Yiwen Zhang, an epidemiologist at Harvard University.
To investigate, Dr Zheng looked at results from three large US studies that had tracked the health and lifestyle habits of nearly 150,000 people for up to 30 years, publishing the results in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
The lowest death rate was in people who did between 90 and 120 minutes of strength training per week. This was seen no matter how much aerobic exercise people did on top of their strength training.
When cause of death was analysed, strength training seemed to protect against not just heart disease, but also cancer and brain diseases. Some previous research has suggested this kind of exercise slows brain shrinkage seen with Alzheimer’s disease.
However, the analysis could not prove that strength training was directly causing the health benefits, because the studies were not randomised trials, the best kind of medical evidence.
They could be biased by the fact that people who do more exercise are more likely to be healthy in other ways, for instance by eating better, said Dr Jonathan Taylor, a lecturer in sport and exercise at Teesside University, who was not involved in the research.
People should not be put off if they cannot manage 90 minutes of strength training, as lower amounts were still linked with a slightly reduced rate of death, added Dr Zheng.
How to do more strength training
“Based on guidelines, people have probably been doing two 30-minute sessions,” said Dr Taylor, so upping that to three would be ideal. “I wouldn’t say that if you were doing 60 minutes it’s a waste of time… it’s better to do something than to do nothing.”
Dr Anna Lowe, a fitness coach and researcher at Sheffield Hallam University, said if people can’t spare time for longer strength training sessions, there are several ways to intensify routines.
These include doing “supersets”, where you cut out rest periods between sets; lifting weights with both arms rather than individually; and doing compound exercises, which work several muscle groups at once. “In things like a squat press, you’re ticking off a whole load of your major muscle groups in one fell swoop,” she said.
Dr Emily Hansell, a sports science academic at Loughborough University, said people starting from scratch could try to fit in 10 to 15 minutes a day of strength training at home. “While dinner is cooking, or you’re watching TV, at-home exercises can also build strength, including using resistance bands and body weight exercises such as squats and lunges.”
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