Benefits of Muscular Strength & Endurance
There's so many benefits of having both muscular strength and muscular endurance, and we'll talk about just a few of those here. Imagine your daily life, and think about how many times throughout the course of a day that muscular strength or muscular endurance would be useful for everyday tasks. Some examples here are if you're moving furniture, so say, for example say you're vacuuming your living room and you're doing a really thorough job, you want to move the couch forward to vacuum behind it; that involves some muscular strength and/or endurance. Moving, if you're talking about moving your whole house or apartment, obviously there's some muscular strength or endurance incorporated there. Lots of other examples where muscular fitness is important throughout our everyday life; you could think of many more examples. In addition to being useful for those tasks, helping you do those tasks more efficiently, participation in everyday activities is often easier when you have greater levels of muscular strength or endurance. So moving that couch forwards causes less physical stress on your body if you have greater levels of muscular strength and endurance. Another benefit is that we have improved physical performance in sport or physical activity, so you can think of many examples in sport where being stronger both from muscular strength or having more muscular endurance would be very important and helpful. The muscles are also very important for the integrity of our joints. In particular, you can think about low back pain, often that's caused by some muscle weakness, and so protection from injury is another benefit of having muscular strength and endurance. Increased metabolic rate: your body uses more energy at rest if you have more muscle, so that's a great benefit of having increased muscular strength and endurance. Maintenance of bone mineral density: having that weight-bearing exercise is very important for bone health, and we'll talk about that in a later lesson throughout this course. And finally, muscle tone often makes us look better and feel better about our bodies, so improved body image is the last benefit of muscular strength and endurance that you see on the slide there.