Many women focus on cardiovascular exercise but strength training exercise is also important for your health. As people age they tend to lose large amounts of strength if they don’t continue participating in strength building activities. By maintaining your strength as you get older you can decrease your chances of injuries. And by maintaining more muscle mass you are also less likely to become overweight, as muscles use more calories.

Strength training exercise can also help to prevent or delay osteoporosis. As strength training exercise makes muscles stronger, it also cause bones to increase in mass and become stronger. So weight bearing exercise that builds muscle strength is essential to keeping your bones strong too.

And don’t forget the WOMAN Challenge:

As I mentioned in previous posts the goal of the challenge is to walk 10,000 steps or exercise for 30 minutes each day.

Its been 3 days into the Challenge and I don’t know if I’m doing ok or not with it. I walked on my treadmill for 40 minutes today, but according to my pedometer I’ve only walked 3763 or so steps on Tuesday. It seems I would have taken more steps than that on the treadmill. I wonder if the pedometer is working right. According to the treadmill I walked 1.53 miles, but less than one mile on the pedometer.

At any rate, I’m going to continue with it. The Challenge has virtual teams so people can encourage and support each other - if you want to join my team follow these instructions:

First you have to register at the site, then go to ‘Find a Team to Join‘ , then scroll down to Missouri, click and then choose the “Ideas For Women .com” team.