Whether you find its key word offensive or not, saying, “Stupid is as stupid does” suggests something important. That actions, not labels, define a person.

You read a fine example of defining actions — albeit absent of any stupidity —in last week’s column.

You read how Ryan DeWald was labeled a Type 1 diabetic in April of 2014, yet didn’t allow that diagnosis to define him. How he took action, learned to control the disease, and went on to have arguably his best season as a cycling pro.

You didn’t get all the details about DeWald’s defining actions, however.

That he read voraciously about the disease and food and how the latter affects the former. That he experimented repeatedly, especially on the bike, with what foods to eat and when to eat them.

All you read was that all that learning led to a good deal of winning on the bicycle, four times, in fact, in the type of race called a criterium (a multi-lap event on a short, closed course done for a predetermined number of time or laps). Those wins combined with 13 other top-five in crit finishes led to him being named the best Category 1 crit rider in Pennsylvania, just five months after the initial diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes.

Talk about a steep learning curve, as well as an uplifting story. Now let’s talk about the story of your life, and why it would behoove you to do some uplifting of your own — an uplifting of barbells or dumbbells or kettlebells or even your own bodyweight, that is.

In other words, to do some form of strength training.

For if you’re not and Forest Gump finds out, you know what he’ll say: “Stupid is as stupid does.” Or, in this case, doesn’t — especially when it doesn’t take much strength training to reap some pretty significant health rewards.

That’s the conclusion researchers made after a review of information accrued on more than 117,000 women over nearly 15 years as part of two large investigations: the Nurses’ Health Study and the Nurses’ Health Study II.

This new study, published in June by the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, compared women who did 120 minutes of strength training a week to those who did none at all and found the first group had a 20 percent lower risk of developing any form of cardiovascular disease. For every additional hour a week spent strength training, the risk decreased another 5 percent.

When the researchers homed in on one specific form of cardiovascular disease risk, the heart attack, the decreased jumped to 44 percent, which is especially noteworthy. For while men are about twice as likely to have one, women are more than twice as likely to die from one and to suffer a second in the five years or so after the first.

A second related recent study includes men because it reviews data from the Health Professionals Follow-up Study along with the two previously mentioned studies and found 90 to 120 minutes of weekly strength training reduces the risk of dying from any form of cardiovascular disease in both sexes by 19 percent. Published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in June, this study also found lifting this often also lowered the risk of dying from a neurological disease like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s by 27 percent, and lowered the risk of dying from any cause by 13 percent.

Which leads you to wonder why in the ever-loving name of Forest Gump over 80 percent of American adults don’t do the 90 to 120 minutes a week of strength training the CDC suggests. My wonderings have led to a theory: that people who fail to strength train fail to recognize the power derived from strength training is its real power.

In terms of resistance training, strength is how much force your muscles can produce. Power is how quickly you can produce it.

Translated into daily living, power is what you need to yank the pull cord on the lawn mower, hoist a heavy bag of rock salt, twist open a tight jar lid, and even rise up from a sofa. It’s what keeps that stumble on uneven pavement from becoming a face plant, a broken wrist, or, god forbid, a broken hip.

Power, my friend, is a good thing to have, but true power training — doing 1 to 5 repetitions as explosively as possible with a relatively light weight (30 to 60 percent of your maximum 1-rep weight) — just might be the most dangerous form of resistance training.

But there’s another way to lift weights that allows you to maintain or enhance power that’s far safer.

Select an amount of weight you can do for 20 or 25 reps at your typical repetition speed. Begin by doing the first five reps at that rate and then pick up the pace.

Be as explosive as you feel is safe at that point, but don’t expect to complete the usual 20 to 25 reps. End the set when you can no longer maintain the increased pace.

Or if you really want to tax the muscle and take your workout to a higher level, take a brief pause and do another 5 reps or so at your typical rate.