Maintaining and building muscle mass is key to improving your overall fitness and health. Skeletal muscles are the tissue that allows voluntary movement of the body, permitting all sorts of motions and supporting the bone structure. Composed by fibers and connective tissue, muscles require movement and nourishment to prevent atrophy and upkeep their structure. Resistance training and strength training are the most effective types of exercise to reach muscle fatigue, which is crucial alongside proper nutrition for achieving muscle hypertrophy.
Resistance training and strength training both have the same goal of challenging the muscle; their primary difference being in that the latter requires using weights like dumbbells or barbells and is usually performed with the sole goal of increasing strength. On the other hand, resistance training is defined as any sort of motion in which muscle contraction is resisted by an outside element or force; this outside element can be the body's own weight, resistance bands, workouts machines like the pilates reformer or even sliders. Both types of training are effective for training and building muscle: strength training by using heavy weights and low repetitions and resistance training by pushing muscle to fatigue with more repetitions and frequency of the movement. The need for progressive overload; meaning the periodical increase of repetitions, weight used or frequency when performing specific exercises is also important for developing muscle no matter the form of movement used. In summary, resistance training and strength training play a vital role in improving muscle mass hence should be present in any ideal fitness routine alongside cardio.
