1 - Helps improve your posture.
Now that some of us work from home, many of us may be sitting down at our desk, hunched over our computer for long periods of time— now more than ever. It’s important to maintain a strong upper body to compensate for the long hours of sitting down. Strengthening your back muscles by training your upper body will encourage you to hold your shoulders back while utilizing your core muscles to help straighten your posture. Having a good posture is also linked with confidence.
So train your upper body, and walk into that next meeting, dinner with friends or any room with your chest out and back straight everybody!
2 - Do daily activities with ease.
Having a strong upper back is great for everyday tasks and activities, especially once we grow old with age. Carrying boxes, or lifting heavy objects will be much easier with a strong upper back, and will prevent any strain or injury in the long run.
3 - Maximizes sports performance.
Whether you play sports for leisure, or competitively, training your upper body can help maximize your performance in a variety of different sports. For instance, a good example would be swimming. With a strong upper body, you can propel your body through the water a lot faster and with ease. Runners not only rely on their legs but their upper body and core allow runners to maintain good form for proper posture to accomplish long-distance runs. So if you’re looking to excel in whatever sport you're passionate about, doing upper body exercises can seriously help you look your best, be your best and do your best.
4 - Helps elevate your workouts.
Having a strong upper body can be beneficial to your workouts. For example, if you’re doing HITT workouts with your body weight, think about the variety of high-intensity workouts you may do in a short period of time. From pushups, overhead press, tricep dips, rows and burpees, there’s a ton of exercises that require upper body strength.
In addition, training the upper body contributes to building more muscle mass in all aspects of your body. Increased muscle mass, means an increase in your metabolic rate, which can result in burning more calories when you’re resting.
5 - Look good and feel good.
To a more superficial point, training your upper body can result in a more defined back and toned arms. Who doesn’t want to be confident wearing tank tops and short sleeve shirts all year long!?
And here’s a tip for the ladies: if you want to give off the illusion of an hourglass figure, training your upper body will give you the illusion of a smaller waist if you train both upper body and legs simultaneously.
If you don’t have access to a gym or weights, here are some great exercises that you can do at home with just your bodyweight:
Pushups or knee pushups
Up and down plank
Tricep dips (on a chair, bench or couch) or bodyweight tricep dip
Kickboxing punches
Supermans
Plank taps
Plank reach-outs
Inchworm
Besides the fact that you can get nice, ripped arms from working your upper body, there are so many great reasons why training your upper body is beneficial for you. We hope this short and sweet blog post has given you more insight into the importance of strengthening your upper body, and you look forward to your next upper body session!