How lifting dumbbells can help make you immune to stress
Is stress getting to you? Do you have a long and stressful commute? Worried about your job? How about a long to-do list? Your worries don’t have to get your immune system down.
Make dumbbell your middle name and you not only beef up your muscles, you beef up your immunity to stress. Why? Because people with decent muscle mass have an easier time recovering from mental stress.
Pump Up the Jam
You can use dumbbells, resistance bands, an exercise ball, or your own body weight to build muscle (think push-ups), to get one step ahead of the stress game.
Having a lean body mass (more muscle, less fat) helps your body normalize blood pressure more quickly after a mentally stressful event, because a fit body does a better job of ridding itself of sodium. And that takes a big load off of your heart and arteries when you’re under the gun.
Ways to Muscle Up
Buff your bod and beat high blood pressure with these cool tools:
- Get fit while you wait in line. Do the No-Workout Workout.
- Skip the gym. Try this complete routine — it uses your body as resistance.
- Watch a video. Shape up in the privacy of your own home with this 20-minute workout.
You don’t need to spend a ton to get into shape. On alternating days, do a brisk walk (get some hills in there) or a resistance-band toning routine (sounds simple, does wonders). As you build lean muscle, the fat burns faster, and the stress and inches will vanish.
It has actually been shown by quite a number of papers that resistance training for insulin resistance is better than aerobic training. There are a variety of other reasons too. Resistance training is referring to muscular exercises. If you just do a bicep curl, you immediately increase the insulin sensitivity of your bicep. Just by exercising, and what you are doing is you are increasing the blood flow to that muscle. That is one of the factors that determines insulin sensitivity is how much can get there. It has been shown conclusively that resistance training will increase insulin sensitivity.
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