Why Women Must Lift Weights

This month we are going to delve into 5 reasons why women need to do weights – that have nothing to do with how they look.

Lifting weights is such a wonderful, impactful mode of exercise that has far reaching, long lasting health benefits that have nothing to do with a look or aesthetic. In fact, encouraging your female client’s aim beyond a look, or a body ideal, will also keep her exercising for longer, with greater motivation too¹!

We are also going to touch on how to communicate and market this to potential new clients, so women realise that there are many more reasons to come and train with you – beyond losing weight!

Lifting Weights is Anti-Aging

To be clear, I am not buying in or promoting the ideal that women should LOOK young forever. By “anti-aging”, I am talking about the effects within the body that contribute to disease. Ageing is characterised by increased inflammation and an increased susceptibility to disease². Exerkines, which are signalling molecules released by various tissues in the body, a triggered by exercise, regulate inflammation, metabolism, and aid in healthy aging.

In studies done on mice, exercise has been shown to activate longevity genes as well as halt or slow age-related muscle loss. There is also a specific gene regulator called DEAF1, which can get stuck “on” later in life, contributing to muscle damage. Exercise can down-regulate this activity and mitigate muscle loss³.

Because muscle loss provides such a substantial contribution to ageing, it makes sense that building muscle is the most effective way to slow it down, although there is benefit from any kind of exercise or physical activity, aerobic or otherwise⁴.

Why Women Must Lift Weights – because of their BRAIN health!

Lifting weights can contribute to dementia prevention, is as effective as an antidepressant for depression treatment and boosts mental health more broadly.

Starting with dementia prevention, weight training may protect the brain and prevent cognitive decline¹. With two out of three people living with Alzheimer’s being women², protecting their brains from cognitive decline is especially important for them!

In another study, lifting weights for 6 months slowed and even halted brains shrinkage, with MRI’s showing healthier brain activity in the weight training group, changes that lasted up to a year after the intervention ended³.

Exercise has been demonstrated to be as effective as a treatment for depression as antidepressants⁴. Strength training specifically has an antidepressant effect with both people diagnosed with depression and those experiencing symptoms⁵. Even if you don’t have depression, lifting weights will have a beneficial impact on mental health more broadly, improving your resilience to mental health problems⁶.

Women are more impacted by depression and mental health problems than men^{7 8}, making a well balanced exercise program, that includes strength training even more important. To this day, there is a gap in medical research, treatments, and outcomes in many health conditions between men and women⁹. Until this gap has been closed, regular exercise remains one of the safest, most accessible, and effective treatments for physical brain health as well as mental health that’s out there!

Learn more about optimising brain health and dementia prevention in our Mini Course (here), or get that course and all the others for FREE when you sign up for Premium in our Skool.

What I mean by “lift weights”

Lifting weights is not necessarily something you need a gym for. Nor is it a specific rep range or set number or even intensity level! All that we are after is to consistently challenge your muscles, and to increase that challenge over time. The technical term for this is “progressive overload” and it basically means to increase the weight as you get better at it.

There’s some great ideas in a previous series that i did a while ago: Weights Without Weights that you can read here.

My name is Clare Hozack, I am an ex-Australian Athlete, ex-NSWIS coach, and on a mission to change how women’s bodies are trained in the fitness industry. If you have a women’s health question, DM me and I will answer it live on Monday at 12pm!

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