Don't blindly pursue intensity in strength training for middle-aged women

When we are training, I often remind female members to reduce the load and focus on movement rather than weight. If the movement is not in place, blindly increasing the weight will only cause other muscles to compensate. In addition, when we are doing strength training, a common mistake is to increase the weight to pursue the feeling of muscle soreness. Some always consider muscle pain as exercising results, and believe not feeling painful means training is not intense enough.

This is indeed a problematic idea. As middle-aged women who have been sitting in the office for 20 or 30 years, we have not exercised in the first half of our lives, why we think about training now and want to do it in the second half of our lives.

The main purpose is of course for health and anti-aging. The core of health and anti-aging is actually anti-oxidation and anti-inflammation. Whenever we are exercising with pain, it is actually our muscles that are slightly torn, because only after some slight damage to the existing muscles, the muscles will thicken and grow stronger during rest. This is called overweight recover. Minor disruption does lead to muscle growth, but disrupting the process also creates mild inflammation in the body.

When people reach middle age, the oxidative stress of the body is already high. What we need most is anti-oxidation and anti-inflammation. Exercise is the goal we need to persist in for a long time, so it must be moderate, and persistence is the most important thing, rather than blindly pursuing intensity. Pain is not conducive to persistence, and secondly, it adds a lot of unnecessary inflammation and oxidative stress to the body.