People who start lifting weight regularly will tell you how much more fit, powerful, and energetic they feel…. but enough about feelings. There’s plenty of good, solid evidence that strength training does all that and more. We bet that at least one of the following reasons will get you to hoist some iron.

1. Stay strong for everyday life
2. Keep your bones healthy
3. Prevent injuries
4. Look Better
5. Speed up your metabolism

Stay strong for everyday life

People who don’t exercise lose 30 to 40 percent of their strength by age 65. By age 74, more than one-fourth of American men and two-thirds of American women can’t lift an object heavier than 10 pounds, like a small dog or a loaded garbage bag. These changes aren’t the normal consequences of aging. They’re a result of neglect — of experiencing life from your lazy boy recliner and the front seat of your Winnebago. If you don’t use your muscles, they simple waste away. This gradual slide toward wimpiness can begin as early as your mid-twenties.

Fortunately, strength is one of the easiest physical abilities to retain as your get older, certainly, you can do a lot more to halt strength loss than you can to prevent wrinkling skin, fading eyesight, or increasing. Once study, which included men up to the age 96, found that by lifting weight, most seniors can at least double — if not triple — their muscle power.

So if you rarely lift anything heavier than a cell phone, it’s time to build enough brawn to get along in the real world. Increased strength is what you need to unscrew the top of a stubborn jar of pickles, hoist your kid onto the mechanical horsy, and close a suitcase that’s too full. Even if you have the stamina to sprint the full length of an airport to catch your plane, it’s not going to do much good if you can’t lug along that overstuffed luggage.

Keep your bones healthy

25 million Americans have osteoporosis, a disease of server bone loss that causes 1.5 million fractures a year, mostly of the back, hip, and wrist. About half of those who break their hips never regain full walking ability, and many of these fractures lead to fatal complications. When bones become extremely weak — picture them like chalk, porous and fragile — it doesn’t even take a fall to break them.

Osteoporosis isn’t something that happens to you overnight, like becoming eligible for a senior discount at the movies. We all start out with strong, dense bones — imagine them as poles of steel. But around the age 35, most people — men included — begin to lose about ½ to 1 percent of their of their bone each year. (For women, bone lose accelerates after menopause — 1 to 2 percent a year for the first five years and then about 1 percent annually until age 70. Then the loss slows back to ½ percent a year.) If you do everything right, however, you can decelerate this bone loss significantly — by about 50 percent. If you have already lost a lot of bone, you may even be able to build some of it back. Strength training alone cant stop bone loss, but it can play a big role. Also important are calcium, vitamin D, and aerobic exercise such as walking and jogging. (Swimming and cycling don’t work because your body weight is supported, either by the water or the bike; when you have to support your own self, your bones respond by building themselves.)

Strong muscles and strong bones go hand in hand. The more weight you can lift, the more stress you can put on your bones; this stress is that stimulates them. The first astronauts to spend time in space experienced significant bone density loss. In space, your weightless, there’s no load placed on your muscle and bones. Today’s astronauts prevent bone loss by exercising several hours a day…