Here’s a depressing fact: the average American gains about two and a half pounds each and every year.  Which means, over the decades, you can probably expect to slowly balloon up to increasingly ill health.

Of course, there are a slew of ways you can counter that upward trend, from healthier eating to walking more each day.  But there’s one hugely effective approach that people often overlook: building some muscle.

Unlike fat – which just sits there – muscle is metabolically active.  Which means that, just by existing, muscle burns calories.  A pound of muscle, in fact, burns about 10 calories a day.  And while that may not sound like much, it adds up surprisingly quickly.  Over the course of a year, each pound of added muscle burns off a pound of fat.

Thus, if you put on just five pounds of new muscle in one year, you would burn off five pounds of fat annually after that.  That’s enough to not only offset the average 2.5-pound gain, but also to help you lose 2.5 pounds each and every year instead.  In other words, as the decades added up and everyone else slid downhill, you’d be getting ever healthier, and looking increasingly good naked, instead.

Normally when I mention this to anyone over even just 30 years old, they tell me they’re too old to get started on lifting weights.  But as a great recent study showed, men in their mid to late 90’s, beginning strength training for the first time, still managed to build substantial strength and put on new muscle mass in just twelve weeks.  So, really, you don’t have any excuse.

In fact, research seems to be showing that strength training positively impacts pretty much every aspect of health and is possibly the single best way to ‘die young as late as possible’.  Yet, for whatever reason, the majority of exercisers still tend to pick up cardio training first (along with maybe some stretching), while overlooking strength training entirely.

But if you do what the majority does, you’ll get what the majority gets; and, here in America, in terms of bodyweight and general health, that’s probably not what you want.  So, buck the trend, and add in a couple of short strength training sessions each week.

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A quick addendum:

In discussion with friends here today, I was reminded that there’s often confusion about what actually constitutes strength training, and about how people gain muscle.  To make a long story short, it boils down to something called ‘progressive overload’ – essentially, lifting incrementally more weight over time.  If you can press ten-pound dumbbells overhead today, and are still pressing those same dumbbells in six months, you haven’t gotten any stronger, and you won’t gain any of that fat-burning, health-promoting new muscle you want.  Instead, you need to build to twelve then fifteen then twenty-pound dumbbells over future months to see results.

That’s hardly a new revelation.  It dates back at least to the 6th Century BC, when Milo of Crete became the most famous athlete in all of Greece after winning the gold medal in wrestling (the big deal sport at the time) six Olympics in a row.  He was a farm boy and had trained by picking