There are various types of exercise, the three main categories being aerobic, balance and coordination, and muscle strengthening. Each plays a role in building a balanced, functional body.
Depending on who you ask, some might argue that cardio or endurance training is superior because of its well-documented heart-health benefits and ability to support fat loss. Others will tell you there’s nothing more effective than lifting weights, while a yoga enthusiast might say flexibility and mindfulness are just as important.
None of these perspectives are wrong. Each type of exercise offers unique benefits. In fact, most people should aim to incorporate all three into their health and fitness routine. Variety not only reduces boredom and targets different aspects of health, but it also helps improve your ability to perform and recover across all modalities.
That said, the form of exercise with the most significant return across the board (especially when it comes to long-term health, resilience, and function) is strength training.
There are benefits to strength training that you just can’t get from a long run, swimming laps, a yoga class, or time on the stairmaster. In fact, a large-scale study found that just 30 to 60 minutes of strength training per week was associated with a 10 to 20 percent reduction in all-cause mortality.
Whether you’re looking to lose body fat, build muscle, move better, feel stronger, prevent injury, or simply stay healthy and active as you age, building strength should be the foundation of your exercise routine.
Today, we’re going to explain why strength training should take priority. We’ll not only cover the benefits of strength training for all fitness levels, but you’ll also learn:
- What strength training actually is and the criteria a workout should meet to truly qualify as strength training
- The different types of strength training workouts and which types of movement do not qualify (if you’re a devoted yogi, you might not love the answer)
- Why strength training is essential for your health and longevity at any age, but especially as you get older
- Practical tips and best practices for strength training beginners (we promise, it’s not as intimidating as it’s often made out to be)
What is Strength Training?
Strength training, also called resistance training, is a type of exercise that causes your muscles to resist an external force. In other words, your muscles are being challenged by something that pushes back. As long as it creates enough load to stimulate your muscles, the resistance can come from a variety of sources.
You can strength train with free weights like dumbbells or kettlebells, gym machines, resistance bands, or even your own body weight. If an exercise applies resistance in a way that improves your physical strength, it qualifies as strength training.
Most strength training is centered around functional movements, such as lifting, pushing, and pulling. However, simply going through these motions doesn’t necessarily mean you are strength training.
Technically, for an exercise to be considered strength training, it should meet two key criteria:
- Challenging Your Muscles (Progressive Overload): To qualify as strength training, the exercise must work your muscles at a higher level of effort than they’re accustomed to. The goal is to gradually increase resistance (whether through heavier weights, more repetitions, or more challenging variations) so that your muscles are consistently pushed to adapt and grow stronger.
- Training to (or Near) Failure: A strength workout should bring your muscles close to fatigue. This means the final reps of a set should feel extremely difficult (or even impossible) to complete with good form. You don’t need to train to failure on every set, but by the final set of a given exercise, you should be pushing yourself close to that point. If you stop too far short, you’re not stimulating your muscles enough to build strength effectively.
Next, we will go over the different types of workouts that qualify as strength training, as well as exercises that generally do not count as strength training.
Just remember, true strength training is different from exercises to improve muscle endurance or tone. In strength training, the focus is on developing maximum muscle strength and the ability to produce force.
If you are really looking to push yourself and want to learn how the professionals train, read “How To Train Like An Olympic Athlete.”
Types of Strength Training
Many types of strength training require your muscles to contract in ways that lead to greater strength. The method you choose depends on your overall health, fitness level, and personal goals.
These are the most popular and commonly used types:
- Bodybuilding: Focused on muscle growth through targeted resistance training and high volume, bodybuilding meets strength training standards by consistently overloading muscles to induce hypertrophy.
- Powerlifting: Centers on maximizing strength in three main lifts: squat, bench press, and deadlift. This is typically achieved through heavy loads and low reps, pushing muscles to failure and beyond.
- Olympic Lifting: Involves explosive, full-body lifts like the snatch and clean and jerk that demand high-intensity effort and progressive overload, developing strength, power, and coordination.
- Functional Strength Training: Focuses on building strength through movements that mirror real-life activities, using moderate to heavy resistance to challenge multiple muscle groups at once. Unlike bodybuilding, which emphasizes muscle size, or powerlifting, which focuses on max strength in specific lifts, functional training develops usable strength, coordination, and stability across a range of motion.
- CrossFit: Combines high-intensity strength and conditioning workouts that regularly include heavy lifts, ensuring muscles are challenged to adapt and grow.
- Calisthenics: Uses body weight as resistance to progressively increase strength through controlled movements like pull-ups, dips, and push-ups, often trained to or near fatigue.
Are Workouts Like Yoga, Pilates, Cycling, and Swimming Strength Training?
They might be, but most likely are not. We didn’t list lower-intensity workouts, such as yoga, Pilates, or barre classes, as a type of strength training because they typically don’t involve progressive overload or work your muscles to a true point of failure.
While these workouts can challenge your muscles and sometimes include muscle-strengthening elements, they generally do not meet the criteria to be considered true strength training.
Other workouts, such as distance running, swimming, cycling, and plyometrics, are also not typically classified as strength training. That said, certain styles of these workouts have the potential to build strength.
For example, advanced reformer Pilates or dynamic yoga styles, such as vinyasa, may apply sufficient force and induce muscular fatigue, resulting in measurable strength gains, particularly for beginners. The same is true for uphill/incline sprints, cycling, or swimming with resistance or resistance tools.
Bottom Line: What separates strength training from other forms of exercise isn’t just muscle engagement; it’s the presence of progressive overload and true muscular fatigue.
While some forms of yoga, Pilates, running, or cycling can create muscular demands that build strength over time, these activities generally lack the load and fatigue required to drive measurable strength gains.
In contrast, methods like bodybuilding, powerlifting, Olympic lifting, CrossFit, and calisthenics (bodyweight training) are specifically designed to increase muscle strength and size through targeted resistance and structured intensity. That’s the key difference.
Why Strength Training is Essential for Long-Term Health
Strength training is one of the most powerful tools you have for improving both your physical and mental health right now and in the future. It provides benefits that you just can’t get from other forms of exercise.
That’s why many experts now consider resistance training to be one of the most effective tools we have for promoting healthy aging and long-term vitality. Research consistently links regular strength training to improved longevity, reduced risk of chronic disease, and better quality of life as we age.
When you strength train consistently, you increase muscle mass and improve the strength and resilience of your tendons and ligaments. These physical changes don’t just support your workouts. They directly impact how you move, feel, and function in everyday life.
Here are a few ways strength training supports your health:
1: Better Joint Stability and Injury Prevention
Stronger muscles, tendons, and ligaments provide more support around your joints. This reduces wear and tear, protects against overuse injuries, and lowers the risk of strains or falls as you age.
2: Improved Bone Density
Strength training stimulates bone remodeling and slows bone loss, which is crucial for preventing osteoporosis and fractures, especially for women entering midlife.
3: Healthier Metabolism and Better Body Composition
More muscle means better insulin sensitivity, improved blood sugar regulation, and a stronger metabolism, all of which lower your risk for weight gain and chronic conditions like type 2 diabetes.
4: Increased Mobility, Coordination, and Balance
Strength training improves body awareness, reaction time, and muscular control. These benefits are key to staying active, independent, and injury-free, especially as you age.
5: Slower Age-Related Muscle Loss
Without resistance training, muscle mass naturally declines over time. Strength training helps preserve lean muscle mass, allowing you to stay strong, energized, fit, healthy, and more capable of being self-sufficient as the years pass.
6: Mood and Stress Regulation
There are many ways strength training can boost mental well-being. Strength training releases endorphins and helps regulate cortisol, your stress hormone. Studies show regular strength training can not only improve mood but also help reduce symptoms of mood disorders like anxiety and depression.
7: Sharper Brain Function
Regular resistance training is associated with enhanced memory, improved focus, and improved overall cognitive function. It may also help protect against age-related cognitive decline.
8: Boosted Confidence and Mental Resilience
There’s something powerful about lifting heavier or doing that extra rep. Strength training builds more than muscle; it builds self-trust, discipline, and confidence, both in and out of the gym.
Strength Training Tips and Best Practices for Beginners
The benefits of strength training are not limited to seasoned lifters. In fact, when done correctly, beginners often see some of the most dramatic improvements.
However, when you’re first getting started, if you aren’t working with a personal trainer, it’s easy to make mistakes in strength training that could lead to mediocre results, plateaus, and even injury.
Here are a few essential tips to guide you as you begin strength training:
Have a Game Plan
Walking into the gym without a plan rarely leads to meaningful progress. Without structure (such as following a periodization training program), it’s easy to fall into random routines or skip exercises altogether, and very difficult to make the most of your training time.
Having a game plan that includes the exercises you’ll be doing and a goal for the number of sets and reps of each gives your training purpose and consistency. This is one reason working with a personal trainer can be so valuable.
A qualified trainer not only helps you create a program tailored to your goals and fitness level but also adjusts it over time to keep you progressing safely and effectively.
Learn and Master Using Proper Form
If your form is off, you’re not only increasing your risk of injury, but you may also be missing the muscle group the exercise is designed to target. Good form ensures that your effort is going where it’s supposed to go. It also helps you lift more effectively and avoid bad movement patterns that can build up over time.
You can search online for how-to guides. However, just because information is on the internet doesn’t mean it’s credible, safe, or tailored to your needs. Also, while seeing a demonstration is better than going in completely clueless, it’s still no substitute for real guidance.
The best way to learn proper form is to work with a personal trainer or fitness coach, even for just a few sessions. They can give you real-time feedback and help you understand the mechanics of each lift so you can build strength safely and effectively.
Another smart approach is using apps and tracers to enhance your workouts, and even filming your workouts.
Don’t Go Too Hard, Too Fast
Strength training should challenge your muscles, not shock your system. One of the most common beginner mistakes is trying to lift too much too soon. Going all-in before your body is ready can increase your risk of injury, delay recovery, and stall progress.
The goal is to stress your muscles just enough to create change without overdoing it. That means starting with manageable weights, learning the basics, and progressing slowly. You want to train with long-term improvement in mind, not with so much intensity that you are too sore to train consistently or hit a wall or plateau after just a few weeks.
Always Warm Up Your Muscles
A mistake a lot of people make (even the most experienced gym-goer) is jumping straight into strength training without warming up. Warming up shouldn’t be treated as optional. A good warm-up prepares your muscles and nervous system for the work ahead, helping reduce the risk of injury and improving your performance.
A warm-up doesn’t need to be long or overly detailed. It can be something as simple as five to ten minutes of light cardio to get your heart rate up and blood flowing, followed by a few minutes of stretching. However, you want to ensure those stretches are dynamic, not static.
Static stretching involves holding a stretch for an extended period without movement (think toe touches or a deep quad stretch). While helpful for flexibility, static stretching is better saved for after your workout when muscles are warm and more pliable.
Before strength training, your focus should be on dynamic stretching, which involves controlled, active movements that mimic the exercises you’re about to do. So, for example, if it’s a leg day, you could do a few rounds of leg swings, walking lunges, and high knees. The idea is to increase your range of motion and activate the muscles you’ll be using.
You should also do at least one warm-up set of your first lift at a lighter weight. These don’t count toward your total set count, but they help prime your body and refine your form.
Have a Post Strength Training Routine That Supports Proper Recovery
What you do after a workout is just as important as what you do during it. Recovery begins immediately, and your body needs assistance in transitioning into this mode. Begin with a brief cool-down, such as an easy walk or gentle movement, to help gradually lower your heart rate.
For optimal post-workout recovery, incorporate a few minutes in the sauna or a cold plunge (or, even better, alternating between both.) While these tools aren’t mandatory, they can drastically accelerate recovery and support consistency over time.
Balance Strength Training With Enough Rest Days
Rest days aren’t a break from progress; they’re part of it. When you lift, you’re actually creating small tears in your muscle fibers. These tears are necessary for strength gains, but they need time to heal. It’s during rest that your body repairs and rebuilds those fibers, making you stronger.
Without enough rest days, you risk burnout, injury, and stalled results. Rest days also give your joints and nervous system a chance to reset. The number of rest days you need depends on your training intensity, but as a general rule, plan for at least one to two full rest days per week.
To learn more, read “The Importance of Rest Days: Balancing Exercise and Recovery.”
Fuel Your Muscles With Proper Nutrition
Your body needs the right fuel to perform, recover, and grow stronger. That starts with eating enough overall. If you’re under-eating, especially while training hard, you’ll slow down recovery and limit your results.
What you eat before and after your workout also matters. Pre-workout nutrition should provide you with the energy to train effectively, typically through a combination of carbohydrates and protein. Post-workout nutrition is even more important.
Post-workout you have a vital window to replenish glycogen, repair muscle tissue, and kickstart recovery. If possible, have a protein shake as soon as possible after strength training. Then, once you get home, have a balanced post-workout meal with plenty of protein, some carbohydrates, and healthy fats.
Oh, and don’t forget to hydrate! This is often overlooked but plays a significant role in performance and recovery. To learn more, read “The Science of Hydration: How Much Water Do You Really Need?”
Master Discipline To Keep Momentum High
Many people ask how to stay motivated to stick with strength training when the real question they should be asking is how to develop discipline.
There are tactics you can use to stay motivated, such as setting clear and realistic goals, tracking your progress, adding a little variety to your routine to avoid boredom, and having a workout buddy or personal trainer for accountability.
However, you can’t rely on motivation alone. It’s fleeting and rarely shows up on the days we need it most. What really keeps momentum high is cultivating discipline, which is the habit of showing up even when you don’t feel like it.
Discipline is built through repetition. The more you follow through on your plan, the more automatic it becomes. Some days will feel exciting, while others will be a struggle and merely routine. But each time you train (especially on the days when you don’t want to), you’re reinforcing the identity of someone who follows through. Over time, that consistency is what keeps momentum steady and leads to real results.
Additional Tips For Beginners
If you are new to fitness, here are a few other great articles to bookmark:
Beginner’s Guide to Fitness: Starting Your Gym Journey
Free Weight vs Machines: Best Method for Muscle Growth
Overcoming Workout Plateaus: Advanced Techniques to Boost Progress
How To Build A Custom Workout That Works
Strength Training FAQs
Is Strength Training Better Than Cardio?
Strength training isn’t better than cardio; it’s just different. Strength training and cardio each offer unique benefits, and ideally, your fitness routine includes both. Strength training builds muscle, improves bone density, and supports long-term metabolic health. Cardio supports heart health and endurance.
The right balance depends on your goals, but for overall health and body composition, strength training should be a priority. That said, prioritizing strength training is often a smarter long-term strategy. Yes, even if your goal is fat loss.
Many people make the mistake of overdoing cardio, thinking it’s the fastest way to burn calories. However, excessive cardio, especially without strength training, can lead to muscle loss. Strength training preserves and builds muscle while encouraging fat loss, resulting in a stronger, leaner, and more resilient body over time.
For more on this topic, read “Cardio vs. Weightlifting: Which is Better for Weight Loss?”
Does Strength Training Burn Fat?
Yes, but not in the way most people think.
Strength training helps build lean muscle, which raises your resting metabolism (meaning you burn more calories even at rest). It also preserves muscle while you’re in a calorie deficit, helping your body burn fat instead of muscle tissue.
Over time, consistent strength training is one of the most effective ways to reduce body fat and reshape your physique.
Is Strength Training The Same As Weightlifting?
Not exactly. While the terms are often used interchangeably, weightlifting is technically a type of strength training (and even a competitive sport) that uses weights to create force.
Strength training is a broader category that includes any resistance-based exercise aimed at building strength. This can involve free weights, machines, resistance bands, or bodyweight movements.
All weightlifting is a form of strength training, but not all strength training involves weightlifting.
Will Strength Training Make Me Bulky?
Done correctly, strength training does build muscle, but it will not automatically make you bulky.
Fears of getting bulky, especially among women, are one of the most common hesitations when it comes to resistance training. However, building visible muscle requires a very intentional approach, often involving months (if not years) of specific hypertrophy protocols and usually a calorie surplus.
Even then, it’s not easy for most people to build the amount of muscle it would take to look super muscular. Unless you’re actively trying to add significant muscle mass, which takes years of focused training, high-calorie eating, and often specific genetics, you’re far more likely to become leaner and more defined than “too muscular.”
How Many Days A Week Should I Strength Train?
Most standard guidelines from agencies, such as the CDC, recommend strength training all major muscle groups at least two non-consecutive days per week. However, this is just a baseline recommendation for overall health and maintaining functional strength.
Two to three sessions a week is a solid starting point, especially for beginners. But as long as you’re balancing strength training with proper rest and recovery, you can train more frequently if your program is structured appropriately.
How many days you strength train ultimately depends on your goals, your workout split, and how many days you can realistically dedicate to training.
For example, if you can only train a couple of days a week and you’re using a full-body workout split, two to three sessions are likely enough. If you’re following an upper/lower body split, four days per week is typical. And if you’re training individual or grouped muscle groups (like chest and triceps one day, back and biceps another, etc.), you’ll likely need five to six days per week.
At the end of the day, there isn’t a magic number of days you should strength train. What matters most is consistency with a program that matches your goals and making the most of the time you do spend in the gym.
Do I Need To Take Supplements If I Am Strength Training?
No, you do not “need” supplements to strength train. That said, there are some supplements that can help improve your strength, stamina, and recovery.
To learn more about incorporating supplements into your strength training workouts, read “Best Pre-workout Supplements For Your Goals” and “Does Creatine Make A Difference.”
Final Thoughts
Strength training isn’t just about aesthetics; it’s one of the most powerful investments you can make in your long-term health and well-being.
Research consistently shows that regular strength training is associated with a lower risk of chronic conditions like heart disease, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, and even cognitive decline.
If your goal is to stay strong, mobile, independent, and healthy as you age, strength training is non-negotiable. But getting started (and doing it right) can be a challenge.
Proper strength training goes beyond picking up weights. It requires good form (you need to know what the movement should look and feel like), a well-structured, custom routine that targets all major muscle groups, and the right balance between effort and recovery.
Without expert guidance, it’s easy to feel unsure or overwhelmed. Working with a personal trainer can make all the difference. A qualified trainer will not only teach you correct form and design a routine tailored to your goals but also help you adjust and progress over time. They’ll ensure you’re training smart, not just hard. And just as importantly, they’ll help you stay consistent.
At RAW Athletic, we not only have a state-of-the-art gym floor equipped with everything needed for those focused on strength training, but we also offer executive locker rooms, recovery rooms featuring infrared saunas and cold plunges, as well as a smoothie bar to meet your post-strength training nutrition needs.
We also have an experienced team of certified personal trainers who can help you develop a strength training plan and provide the right support to execute it.
