Muscular strength and endurance are the two important aspects of building “strength quality”. Muscular strength refers to the maximal force a muscle could exert, and muscular endurance is the ability of a muscle to sustain repeated contractions against resistance. Not only are they the basis of day-to-day activities of human bodies, but also the basis of your physical quality such as speed, flexibility, coordination and balance.

As one grows older one’s strength quality declines. However, strength training can slow down the process of the decreased muscular strength. There is evidence that elderly people can still keep their muscles pumped through persistent strength training. For people who are underweight or of a frail figure, strength training serves as a must to increase their physical strength.

To improve our strength, we can use equipment like dumbbells, weights or unarmed weight-bearing or resistance exercises to mainly focus on training the parts of our muscles including shoulder and neck, chest, abdomen, lower back, upper limb and lower limb. Usually, we train our gross motor first, then our fine motor. The exercises order could be arranged as the followings: lower back - legs - shoulder and chest - arms - abdomen - neck. About weighting, the principle of taking the maximal force in a resistance exercise to develop your muscular strength should not be more than 4 to 8 times of continuous curls. After finished exercising each group 8 times or more, you may increase the training weight. The principle of weighting in exercises that develop our muscular endurance is to load continuous curls 15 to 30 times as a maximum, for example, sit-ups or push-ups. In general exercises, each part of our muscles can be arranged in 2 to 3 group exercises, the break between each group should be around 1 minute, and the exercise should be repeated 2-3 times every week.

In addition, we should do 5 to 10 minutes warm-up exercise before strength training in order to fully stretch and relax our muscles. In this way, the blood circulation of our muscles could be stimulated and hence our body temperature would be increased gradually and muscle strain be avoided. After strength training, a cool-down workout is also necessary for relaxing your contracted muscles in the stretching exercises and to prevent or reduce the muscle soreness you may feel next day after training. During the process of training, we would strongly recommend you: Access your capability, and go step by step!