Understanding weight training is an important part of fitness
Will exercising for 30 minutes three times a week make you fit? Does exercising for 60 minutes seven days a week?
To become fit, you have to make your heart and skeletal muscles stronger. Exercising at a casual pace does not strengthen muscles. Lifting a weight ten times in a row and not feeling a burn in your muscles will not make you significantly stronger.
When you exercise intensely, your muscles stretch and tear. It’s the tearing that causes the burning during exercise, and leads to the soreness that you feel for the next day or two. When your muscles heal from these tears, they are stronger than they were before. So it’s the burning during exercise that causes the tearing that causes the next-day soreness. Then you take days off or go slowly so you can recover; your muscles heal, which gets rid of the soreness, and with healing, the muscle is stronger than it was before you did the exercise.
However, there are some serious problems with training for real fitness. If the force on your muscles during exercise is greater than the strength of your muscles, they will tear too much and you will be injured. If your muscles are still sore from a previous workout and you try to exercise intensely, you can cause a serious injury. You must learn to tell whether the burning is the good burning that causes muscle growth or the bad burning in which you put too much force on your muscles and tear them so you can’t exercise at all.
