Lift heavy things

Why strength training belongs in every woman's healthcare plan

Last week I wrote about how perimenopause can start in your 30s, and how you don’t need to be near menopause to need that information. You just need a body that will get there. This post is the natural next question: if that’s coming, what can I actually do about it now?

One of the clearest answers is also one of the least glamorous. Nobody tells you that your muscle has an expiration timer. Starting around age 30, you begin losing 3-5% of your muscle mass per decade, whether you notice it or not. No symptoms, no warning text, just a slow leak.

Almost every benefit below shows up now, in your 30s, and the ones that don’t are the ones you’re quietly banking for later. Many of us think of the gym as a vanity project, something for “after,” once the real priorities are handled. But what if it’s actually closer to preventive medicine than to anything cosmetic? And what if the best time to start is years before you’d ever think you needed to?

The muscle clock

Muscle loss isn’t linear, and it isn’t gentle to women specifically. The slow leak that starts in your 30s turns into a flood later: around menopause, declining estrogen accelerates the loss of muscle mass and strength in a way that isn’t seen in age-matched men. OB/GYN and menopause specialist Dr. Mary Claire Haver describes this as sarcopenia that begins in a woman’s 40s and accelerates sharply with the hormonal changes of perimenopause. Her reframe for patients: exercise to stay strong, not to stay thin.

Here’s why this matters at 32 and not just 52. The muscle you build now is the buffer you draw down from later. Walking into perimenopause with more muscle is like walking into it with more savings. You don’t get to make up for a decade of not investing by cramming at the end. Resistance training has been shown to reverse this exact pattern even in postmenopausal women, which is the good news, but it’s a lot easier to hold onto muscle than to rebuild it from scratch. Your muscle is one of the few systems in your body that gets to renegotiate the terms with age, but only if you show up and load it.

Your bones are listening

Same logic, different tissue. You build most of your peak bone mass by your late 20s, and then the job shifts to protecting it. Roughly 200 million women worldwide have osteoporosis after menopause, and bone mass erodes at 1.5-2.5% a year in the years right after it begins. A fracture from that erosion doesn’t just hurt, it raises your risk of long-term disability and loss of independence.

Resistance training is one of the few interventions that directly counters this. Research on postmenopausal women shows that higher-intensity strength training (working at 70% or more of your one-rep max, a few times a week) meaningfully improves bone mineral density in the spine and hip. Exercise physiologist Dr. Stacy Sims puts it plainly: heavy lifting is good for building bones. Your skeleton responds to load. Lift, and it rebuilds. Sit still, and it doesn’t get the memo to hold on to what it has.

The metabolic case

Muscle isn’t just for lifting things. It’s also where your body handles blood sugar. The more of it you have, the better your body manages glucose, which matters for anyone dealing with PCOS, pre-diabetes, or a family history of type 2 diabetes. The research backs this up: strength training improves the markers doctors use to measure blood sugar control and insulin sensitivity.

But muscle is built from protein, and most women eat nowhere near enough of it. If you’re lifting while eating like a bird, you’re underfueling the work you’re putting in. So what’s the actual number? Here’s roughly where the targets land:

• The old RDA, 0.8g per kilogram of body weight: a floor to prevent deficiency, not a target for building anything.

• Active women, per the International Society of Sports Nutrition: 1.4 to 2.0g per kilogram per day to build and keep muscle. That’s about 0.6 to 0.9g per pound, so a 150-pound woman is looking at roughly 95 to 135g a day.

This is the piece I’m actively working on, and it’s a lot harder than it sounds. Hitting those numbers daily takes real intention, and I’m not there consistently yet. But knowing the number and setting the goal is the first step to closing the gap.

Protein isn’t only a lifting concern, either. It becomes urgent in pregnancy, when your body is quite literally building another human. In her new book 9 Months That Count Forever, biochemist Jessie Inchauspé makes the case that what you eat in those nine months helps shape your baby’s lifelong health, from brain development to metabolic resilience, with protein and specific nutrients doing a lot of the heavy lifting. The research backs the “more than you think” point: studies measuring protein needs directly in pregnant women found the true requirement is far above the old guideline, roughly 1.2g per kilogram in early pregnancy and 1.52g in late pregnancy, versus the RDA of 1.1. The theme keeps repeating: the official minimums were set low, and women in particular have been quietly under-eating protein at exactly the stages of life when they need it most.

Your brain and your batteries

Lifting also does real work on your mood and energy. A meta-analysis in JAMA Psychiatry found that resistance training meaningfully reduced depressive symptoms. It also helps maintain your mitochondria, the cellular power plants that fade with age, which is part of why lifting tends to leave you with more energy, not less.

But won’t lifting make me look bulky? No.

This is the myth that keeps the most women out of the weight room. Building the kind of large, bulky muscle people picture requires high testosterone, and women produce a fraction of what men do. Add in that visible muscle takes years of deliberate, high-volume training and a real eating surplus, and “accidentally getting huge” simply isn’t a thing that happens. What you actually get is the opposite: lean muscle plus less fat, which is exactly what people mean when they say “toned.”

Ideas on how to get started:

• Train 2 to 4 times a week, hitting the large muscle groups (legs, back, chest, core) with compound moves like squats, deadlifts, and rows.

• Use progressive overload: nudge the weight or resistance up over time as your body adapts. This is the part that drives nearly all the benefits above. (Dr. Haver’s own routine is strength training 3 to 4 times a week on exactly this model.)

• Go heavy enough to genuinely challenge the muscle, not just move it around.

• Starting from zero? Two sessions a week with a trainer, a beginner program, or even bodyweight and resistance bands. The floor is lower than the fitness industry wants you to believe.

• If you’re in NYC, the studio I’d point you to is Liftonic (downtown, with locations across lower Manhattan and Williamsburg). It’s built around progressively lifting heavier and keeping muscles under real tension, and the instructors actually correct your form, which is what lets a beginner load real weight safely. A lot of buzzier boutique classes wave three-pound dumbbells around to a great playlist and call it strength training. That’s cardio in disguise. Bonus: because the method builds muscle while dropping fat, it’s also one of the fastest ways to see the change in the mirror.

None of this requires overhauling your life. A few sessions a week, enough protein, and a little patience compound into a body that’s stronger now and far more resilient later. Start before you think you need to.

I’d love to hear in the comments: are you lifting yet? If not, what's your biggest hurdle? Is it the time, the intimidation, the protein, the where-do-I-even-start?

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Thanks for reading Eggs & Ops! I’ll never gatekeep what I learn.

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