The development and publication of the “Australian Evidence-Based Physical Activity Recommendations for Adults (18-64 years)” by the Australian Government, The Department of Health (August 2012) promote the participation in “muscle strengthening activities” to:
• Manage blood pressure, blood sugar and blood cholesterol levels.
• Prevent and control heart disease and type 2 diabetes.
• Improve posture, mobility and balance.
• Reduce the risk of falls and injury.
• Maintain your ability to do everyday tasks.
Evidence? Who needs evidence………
However, let me inform you that there are components of these guidelines that have virtually no supporting scientific evidence. The advice that “I could do tasks around the house that involve lifting, carrying or digging” whilst facilitating energy expenditure and contributing to an active lifestyle are not well defined and are somewhat nebulous. For example, lifting a chair up, carrying a full bag of rubbish to the outside bin or doing some gardening will do very little to nothing to improve your muscle strength or power. Many of these are normal everyday activities that pose no significant challenge to our musculoskeletal system and hence will be unlikely to bring about full realisation of the benefits mentioned above. Perhaps you could contend that heavy digging that produces fatigue and requires constant breaks could be classified as “strength-like” training, but how many people (unless doing as a job) are out in the backyard doing regular heavy digging every week.
Is this enough?
If you really want to improve your muscle strength and power, which has been shown to have so many benefits for older adults, and that I have outlined elsewhere (see here), you need to perform challenging resistive-type physical activities or exercise that involve “high effort”. You can utilise a number of different things to do this (e.g. traditional apparatus like barbells/dumbbells, kettlebells, machine weights or plain old bodyweight-based exercises or resistance bands or anything around the house that is challenging to to lift and move around…in fact pretty much anything if you know how) – but most importantly when you use any of these things the muscle work needs to be hard to very hard for you and/or high to very high in effort. If you meet such requisites you can be confident that what you are doing is resistance or strength training and will consequently help achieve the benefits mentioned previously.
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