If you’ve read any of my articles before, you know my feelings on weight training. When you weight train, you add muscle tone, decrease injury risk, and even improve the density of your bones. But as you can guess from the title, there may be even more benefits than physical. There may actually be a connection between weight training and depression.
Weight Training and Depression: What We Already Know
If you look, you’ll find plenty of information already out there about exercise and depression. It’s pretty common knowledge at this point that it’s good for your mental health. Back in 2016, you may have heard of a large scale review that concluded that being fit substantially reduces the risk of clinical depression.
But most of these older studies and reviews have focused on things like aerobic exercises like walking or jogging. Before now, the only real research you could find was a study about strength training helping with anxiety. But we all know that anxiety and depression are different things.
Weight Training and Depression: The Study
So, now we’ll move on to the actual new information. As you may have heard, this new study was published in May in JAMA Psychiatry. This one was put on by the same researchers who had done the earlier study on anxiety. They wanted to see whether available research could tell you if lifting weights can affect the onset or severity of depression. Of course, they also wanted to determine if other factors like age, gender, or weight would matter.
They began by gathering the best studies they could related to exercise and depression. But they made sure that the experiments included testing for depression both before and after. The researchers then compiled the results of this data to form a conclusion.
Brett Gordon, the paper’s author, stops short of calling the resistance training an all out cure for depression. But he says the findings are compelling. Especially since weight training is more accessible to most people than therapy and medication.
Reistance training consistently reduced the symptoms of depression, whether or not you are formally diagnosed. And funny enough, the amount of weight training did not seem to matter. The benefits were the same for people who went two times a week as five times a week. All that mattered was them showing up and finishing the workouts.
Weight Training and Depression: The Conclusion
So to put this in simple layman’s terms, weight training and depression do have a connection. The connection being that weight training reduced the symptoms of the disease with almost as much efficiency as therapy and medication. Now, I’m absolutely not advocating for you to buck either of those two options, but adding weight training as a supplementary part of your mental health routine two or three times a week will do you no harm. In fact, it’ll very likely do you plenty of good. Even if you don’t train like you’re getting ready to compete at the Olympia. Buy yourself a set of dumbbells and a workout bench, get strong, and feel better about yourself all at once.
