You've heard you need to exercise to manage your weight, but what kind of exercise is best? You could try resistance exercise, but isn't that just for body builders?

Not necessarily.

The American College of Sports Medicine now recommends weight training for every adult. Whether you call it resistance exercise, weight training or strength training, research now suggests maintaining muscle mass is the key to long-term weight management.

Muscles make up about 45% of total body weight. When they contract, they use an enormous amount of energy. Even at rest, though, muscles burn calories. So, the more muscle you have, the higher your metabolism, and the more calories you burn.

As we age, we tend to lose muscle and gain fat. Since muscle burns a lot of energy, losing muscle slows your metabolism. In fact, your metabolism drops two to five percent each decade after age 20. Fewer calories are burned and more are stored as fat. Without weight training to prevent this loss, you may lose six to eight pounds of muscle each decade.

While most studies show exercise alone doesn’t provide long-term weight loss, exercise and diet combined seem to help both early and long-term weight control. Resistance exercise, in particular, helps preserve lean muscle, which increases the number of calories you burn.

In fact, one estimate is that you burn anywhere from 50–90 more calories at rest per day for every pound of muscle you add. Weight training also causes other subtle changes in your metabolism, which helps your body stop storing abdominal fat.

You may be thinking you have to spend hours at the gym to achieve these results. Not so. The American College of Sports Medicine recommends a mini­mum of one set of ten “reps” for eight to ten exercises for beginners. So, you can boost your metabolism and burn fat simply by choosing eight to ten simple resistance exercises—sit-ups, push-ups, thigh lifts, hand weights, etc.—and doing ten of each. Simple, right?

Better yet, you don’t even have to do resistance training every day. While you should try to exercise most days of the week, you only need to do resistance exercises three or four times a week to get the benefits we talk about here. Ideally, resistance exercise should be incorporated into an overall wellness program that includes aerobic and flexibility exercises, proper diet, and stress management.

So why resist? Try adding some muscle to your workout through resistance training!