Mental Health Benefits Of Strength Training
I’ve struggled with depression and social anxiety for many years. I can still feel the hurt and embarrassment at overhearing someone describe me as “painfully shy” in high school.
These days, I feel strong and confident. I feel happy and optimistic. I still get anxious and depressed sometimes, but it doesn’t define me anymore.
It’s been a long road, and I’ve done a lot of work on myself over the years. I tried medication, therapy, and self-help. The thing that made the biggest difference for me was exercise, particularly strength training.
I truly believe in the life-changing mental health benefits of strength training, and I want to share those benefits with you.
I created my Strength Training For Anxiety Program to help people get stronger mentally as well as physically, and to help them change their thought patterns and behaviors so they can thrive. It’s a 12-week workout program, guided by an app so you can do the workouts on your own, anytime, anywhere. It also includes unique features, video lessons, and worksheets specifically designed to help manage anxiety.
How Does Strength Training Improve Mental Health?
You’ve probably heard that exercise is good for your mental health, but you might not realize how incredibly powerful it can be. There is a mountain of research demonstrating the mental health and mood boosting effects of exercise. In fact, exercise has been shown to be as effective as other treatments for some people.
You might have also heard that exercise improves mental health by releasing endorphins that make you feel good. That’s true, but it seriously oversimplifies and minimizes what exercise can do.
It’s like the way people oversimplify the value of a good meal. Yes, a good meal activates pleasure centers in your brain. But it does so much more than that. A good meal nourishes you, it provides comfort and satisfaction, it can transport you through time and space and connect you to deep emotional memories.
There’s so much more to the positive effects of exercise as well.
Along with endorphins, exercise releases a lot of different substances in your body and brain, including neurotransmitters, endocannabinoids, and neurotrophic factors.
Some of those can boost your mood. Others dull pain. Others help different areas of your brain communicate with each other better, and some even change the structure of your brain itself.
Many of those substances are the same ones that are targeted by antidepressant and antianxiety medications.
Changing Your Mind
When exercise re-wires your brain, it changes the way you think and feel. If you’re intentional about it, you can use strength training to create better mental strength and resilience, challenge the negative thought patterns that keep you stuck in your anxiety or depression, and build skills that will help you take control of your feelings and emotions.
This, I believe, is where the real magic lies. It’s in the way that your changing brain helps you see yourself in a different light.
It doesn't have to be this way!
Some Specific Mental Health Benefits Of Strength Training
It can be hard to make the connection between your workouts and your mental health. In fact, I think this is one reason why a lot of people who start exercising don’t feel enough of a boost in their mental well-being.
You need to be intentional and strategic about how you use your strength workouts to improve your mental health.
Here are just a few of the ways I’ve seen my clients (and myself) connect strength training to the skills that help them manage their mental health.
Getting Back In Touch With Your Body
Your body is constantly sending you signals. The skill of listening to and understanding those signals is called interoception.
Some of those signals are pretty obvious. Your body lets you know when you need energy from food by making you feel hungry. When you’re starting to get dehydrated and need to replenish fluids, you feel thirsty. When you need to sleep to reinvigorate your mind and repair the cellular damage that accumulates during the day, you feel tired. But even those clear signals are easy to overlook or push away.
You're tired but you want to watch your favorite show, so you keep the tv on and stay up anyway. You’re hungry but you have a work deadline, so you skip lunch. If you keep ignoring them, over time you stop noticing those signals.
Strength training can help you start listening again. It forces you to pay attention to how you move and what’s going on in your body. With practice you learn to feel and activate the right muscles in each exercise, and you get better at noticing subtle changes in your heart rate and breathing.
Your body also lets you know when you’re starting to get anxious or depressed. If you’re tuned in, you can intervene and do something about it before it becomes a problem. You can practice some deep breathing or reframe the situation.
Sometimes when I’m anxious, I’ll actually start holding my breath. There was a time when I wouldn’t even notice I was doing that until I was deep within a cycle of stress and anxiety. These days I can quickly feel my anxiety rising, and I can take steps to calm down before the cycle even starts.
Creating Mastery Experiences
Another one of the mental health benefits of strength training is that it gives you “mastery experiences”, which are opportunities to achieve small goals or build skills.
You might think that strength training only builds physical skills, but you’d be wrong. It also builds the mental skills that can help you manage your anxiety or depression.
Strength training teaches you how to be patient, persistent and resilient in the face of obstacles. It gives you practice at challenging yourself and overcoming those challenges. It reinforces the self-identity you’re trying to build of someone who follows through on their plans, is capable of change, or feels confident.
When you exercise, you get a chance to show yourself (and others) that you are strong and capable. And you get to go a step further, creating feelings and emotions rather than just knowledge.
When you lift a heavy weight, you don’t just know that you’re strong, you get to really feel it. When you push yourself a little harder even though your muscles are burning, you feel capable of doing hard things without giving up. If you can complete one more rep than last time or lift a slightly heavier weight, you feel yourself improving.
This is why I think there’s something particularly special about strength training. It gives you so many opportunities in each workout to feel yourself changing and growing into the person you want to be.
In a single workout, you might do 3 sets of 10 reps of 6 different exercises. That’s 180 repetitions. 180 chances to improve, to feel something positive, to do something valuable for yourself.
Getting Comfortable With Discomfort
It’s common for people with depression or anxiety to avoid discomfort. I get that. It’s hard enough to face difficult situations and get out of your comfort zone, and it’s even harder when you have anxiety and depression weighing you down.
But when you avoid hard things, your world shrinks. You miss out on opportunities and experiences. If you want to thrive and achieve your full potential, you have to be willing to deal with discomfort.
This is one of the biggest mental health benefits of strength training. It gives you opportunities to practice the skill of pushing through discomfort in a safe and controlled environment.
Out in the world, it’s scary when your heart starts pounding or you feel suddenly fatigued. You don’t always know why those things are happening and if you’re going to be ok. You don’t know whether you’ll be able to handle a new or difficult situation. There’s uncertainty, and that’s a difficult thing to deal with.
In the gym, though, you know exactly why your heart rate is up and your muscles are burning. You’re in control of the weights, and you can stop and rest whenever you want.
Over time, you get used to feeling uncomfortable. It doesn’t feel frightening and out of control anymore. You learn that you’re strong and resilient enough to face discomfort and come out better on the other side. You can choose to lean into discomfort and use it to grow and improve.
When you feel the urge to turn away from discomfort in your daily life, like the instinct to skip a social event where you might not know anyone or turn down a work project because you’re not confident you can complete it, you can remember that in your last workout you picked up a heavy weight and carried it all the way across the gym floor. You pushed yourself even though you were tired. You felt out of breath, and you kept going. You’re strong and you can do hard things.
Challenging Negative Thought Patterns And Changing Your Self-Identity
We all have ideas about who we are and what we’re capable of. With depression and anxiety, those ideas sometimes hold us back.
Maybe you think of yourself as a person who never follows through and isn’t capable of achieving big things. You might see yourself as someone who shrinks away from hard situations, or who gets easily discouraged or overwhelmed. You might have a habit of taking things personally, ruminating on the past, or worrying about the future, and you might feel unable to change those habits.
Often these ideas and thought patterns are deeply ingrained. Those narratives feel true, but guess what… they’re not. Your thoughts and feelings are just thoughts and feelings, they are not reality. They’re just how you perceive reality.
The question is: how do you change those perceptions?
You can try to talk yourself out of those feelings all you want, but in my experience, that doesn’t work very well. I’ve tried, and I’ve come to realize that you can’t use your mind to change your mind. But you can use your body to change your mind.
It’s taking action that can truly change your thought patterns and your self-concept.
This is where strength training comes in. In the gym, you can prove to yourself, through your actions, that you are becoming the kind of person you want to be.
If you’re in the habit of filtering out the positives in your life and focusing on the negatives, you can practice intentionally finding the good during your workout. You showed up, you did something for yourself, you’re physically able to get out of bed and move your body (that’s a gift and something you should appreciate every day), you lifted a little more weight, moved a little more smoothly, or were able to mentally and physically push yourself a little harder.
Over time, you’ll get better at finding the positives throughout your day.
When you’re worried about what might happen in your work meeting, you can think back to your workout and remember that even though you were a little nervous to pick up a heavier weight, you were able to handle it and you even set a personal best. You can practice being resilient during your workouts, in small but consistent ways, and over time you’ll start to see yourself as a resilient person.
Think about the kind of person you want to be and use your training sessions to take action towards becoming that person. Keep at it and you’ll transform your mental (and physical) health.
Do You Want To Experience The Mental Health Benefits Of Strength Training?
My mission is to help people access the amazing mental health benefits of strength training. If you want to get started on your journey today, check out my Strength Training For Anxiety Program! For personalized coaching programs, contact me!
Wishing you good health!