If you do not challenge your body, you cannot change it.

No matter your current age, it’s never too late to do something to improve your health and fitness. In fact, you should think of it as an investment – something that builds, increases and strengthens as time passes.

Proper exercise is mandatory. When it comes to protecting our health, and delaying the aging process, there’s simply no substitute for exercise. In fact, it is a well-known fact, that long-term resistance training (strength training) is associated with a lower risk to age-associated morbidity and mortality.

Because we lose vital muscle strength as we age, strength training is the golden ticket needed to keep us healthy and strong throughout adulthood. 

The benefits of strength training/resistance training do much more than just making us stronger. This type of challenging exercise helps optimize biomarkers indicative of overall wellness such as triglycerides, LDL-cholesterol, and HDL-cholesterol in both men and women.

And, the benefits don’t stop with increased strength. Physical exercise works on your brain too! It helps build a brain that not only resists shrinkage but increases cognitive abilities. Memory is improved with the generation of new neurons in the hippocampus. In fact, study after study supports the idea that higher levels of physical activity are linked to a sharper mind with fewer age-related effects on the brain.

Brain cells use lots of energy and need lots of oxygen as well to function properly. Exercise boosts energy. It encourages the brain to work at optimum capacity by causing nerve cells to multiply, strengthening their interconnections, and protecting them from damage.

Compared to an active person, a sedentary person experiences more fatigue when carrying out a physically demanding task. When your energy levels are low, you need to expend some to get some.

According to a Harvard Medical School report, exercise boosts energy in four main ways.

How Exercise Boosts Energy:

  • As you work out, your muscles burn more energy, and as they do, mitochondrial function increases. Mitochondria are known as the powerhouses of the cell. They are organelles that act like a digestive system which takes in nutrients, breaks them down and creates energy rich molecules for the cell.The biochemical processes of the cell are known as cellular respiration. May of the reactions involved in cellular respiration happen in the mitochondria. Mitochondria are the working organelles that keep the cell full of energy so keeping these healthy is vital to healthy aging.
  • Your body’s oxygen-carrying capacity increases with regular exercise because it creates more capillaries, and by breathing more deeply and increasing your heart rate, you pump more oxygen into your blood.
  • Exercise affects the levels of several hormones and other chemical messengers some of which control your mood.
  • Working out helps you to get more refreshing rest by increasing the time you spend in deep sleep. Even if you have the same amount of sleep, the sleep of active people is more restorative and refreshing and they don’t wake up as often.

The reality is, human bodies are made to respond to physically challenging situations and believe it or not, you can erase 10-20 years of inactivity with just a few months of performing a proper, challenging exercise program.

It’s not rocket science to understand that the earlier you begin preparing for your later years, the better you can minimize their impact on your body.

Note: To get the biggest anti-aging cellular boost, do your strength training with some effort to challenge your body. Remember, if you do not challenge your body, you cannot change it. A recent Mayo Clinic study says that high intensity type exercise can actually reverse some cellular aspects of aging. When compared, high-intensity interval training offered the same kind of benefits that strength training/resistance training does.

If you’d like to know how to get started with a no-muss, no-fuss approach to home-based exercising for solid fitness gains go…

Check out my quick and easy

Project Me Finally Fit program

At just 10 minutes in length, if you cannot find a way to squeeze this kind of effective workout into your schedule every other day, it’s likely there’s not another one in all existence that could take it’s place.

After all, most things can only be made so simple before they just cannot be made to work at all!

– Carolyn “The 10-Minute Sandbag Workout” Hansen

If you’d like to know more about how THE most effective form of fitness training and strength building that you are ever likely to come across is… can be made to work for you, then click the following link to learn more…

Project Me Finally Fit sandbag kit.

P.S. I even created a FREE mobile app for you to keep track of your sandbag workouts. With 4 built-in workouts of 7 distinct sandbag movements, you have 28 different exercises to choose from should you decide to create your own custom sandbag works.