A Simple Fitness Habit to Drastically Improve Your Health

Sometimes it’s the simplest things that make the biggest difference.

Sometimes the simplest things can make the biggest difference in our health. And a lot of the time, achieving good health is just about getting back to the basics.

And one of the most basic movements we can engage in is to lift heavy things on a regular basis.

Our ancestors were regularly lifting heavy things: women carried babies and the food they had gathered, men carried the game they killed as well as all the tools required to do so.

We have evolved to carry and move heavy objects. And therefore, we can optimize our health by emulating how our ancestors lived and lifting heavy on a regular basis.

We don’t need complicated and intricate workout programs. To be honest, we don’t need workout programs at all. Sometimes, we just need to focus on the fundamentals.

Why is lifting heavy things good for us?

Lifting heavy things is good for:

• Keeping our mitochondria young: “In the recent study “Resistance Exercise Reverses Aging in Human Skeletal Muscle” it was proven that six months of progressive resistance training, i.e., weight training that gets heavier over time, i.e., “lifting heavy stuff,” made the gene expression pattern of aging mitochondria significantly younger.” — Ben Greenfield
• Protecting our DNA from aging
• Increasing the number of type II fibers we have in our muscles. Having more of these fibers leads to a reduction in fat mass as well as increasing insulin sensitivity.
• Retaining muscle mass and mitigating sarcopenia. As we age, we inevitably start losing muscle mass. While this is normal, if we can slow this process as much as possible, we can avoid issues later on.
• Preventing death: “Older adults who strength trained at least twice a week had 46 percent lower odds of death for any reason than those who did not. They also had 41 percent lower odds of cardiac death and 19 percent lower odds of dying from cancer.”

“Lifting heavy weight could be one of the most potent tactics for defying age.” — Ben Greenfield

What should we do?

Lift something heavy, a couple of days each week.

Obviously, all of us are at a different place strength and ability-wise in regards to lifting weights. However, any form of lifting will be beneficial, regardless of your current abilities.

Mark Sisson and Ben Greenfield both advocate for lifting 2–3 times per week, and utilizing full-body movements as much as possible.

If you’re a novice lifter, you can focus on doing more repetitions rather than lifting really heavy. Both will achieve a similar outcome.

This doesn’t even need to be a full gym workout. It can be as simple as lifting something heavy a few times each day. It can even be lifting your body a few times each day — i.e., doing a few pushups, sit-ups, bodyweight squats, or pull-ups.

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