By Korin Miller
Over the past few years, public health organizations have stressed the importance of adding strength training to your regular fitness routine. And now, a new study shows that there’s more to it than just getting toned: It may help you live longer.
That’s the major takeaway from a meta-analysis published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. For the analysis, researchers looked at data from 16 studies of nearly 480,000 people between the ages of 18 and 98. In the studies, people either self-reported how much strength training they did or answered questions about it in interviews.
“Muscle strengthening is associated with preservation of skeletal muscle mass, which then plays an important role in glucose metabolism,” says Anton Bilchik, M.D., Ph.D., chief of medicine and director of the gastrointestinal research program at Saint John’s Cancer Institute at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, Calif. (Glucose metabolism, in case you’re not familiar with it, is the process of your body turning glucose, aka sugar, into energy for your body.) “Abnormal glucose metabolism has been associated with an increase in cardiovascular disease and cancer,” Dr. Bilchik points out.