5 Benefits of Weight Lifting That You Can Experience At Any Age

It’s never too soon or too late to start building muscle. As women and men age, our muscles shrink, starting in our thirties and progressing more rapidly as we age. Sarcopenia is the medical name for the age-related loss of muscle mass and strength: We lose some amount of muscle mass per decade as we age, and this becomes a factor in how frail our bodies are and increases the likelihood of falls and fractures.

A 2015 report from the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research found that people with sarcopenia had 2.3 times the risk of a fracture from a fall, such as a broken hip, collarbone, leg, arm, or wrist. “Consider it the gray hairs of the musculoskeletal system,” says Cheri Blauwet, M.D., a sports medicine physician at Harvard who specializes in female masters’ athletes.

Satellite cells are the stem cells responsible for regenerating muscle tissue. (They are called satellite cells because of their position orbiting the muscle fiber.) These cells are responsible for responding to stresses such as injury or exercise by stimulating muscle growth.

Estrogen levels have been shown to play a role in the maintenance of these cells, and as estrogen levels decline during perimenopause and menopause, so do satellite cells.

Strength training, by contrast, actually helps stimulate these muscle-regenerating cells.

In a study where muscle biopsies were taken among over one hundred subjects of different ages, certain types of muscle fibers got significantly smaller with age, accompanied by a reduction in their satellite cell content.

Results from a subgroup of older adults in their sixties and seventies who performed twelve weeks supervised resistance-type exercise training showed that the extra training significantly increased the type II muscle fiber size and satellite cell content in their bodies.

Resistance training helps build bones. Up to 20 percent of a woman’s bone density loss happens during the menopausal transition. This is a big deal because bone loss leads to bone fractures, which can significantly reduce quality of life, decrease mobility, cause pain, and increase mortality. 

Strength-training activities—as well as weight-bearing aerobic exercises like walking, running, or cycling (activities that place stress on bones)—work to build stronger bone matter. While you are exercising, the bones are stimulated to produce more bone tissue—they become denser, so the risk of osteoporosis and fractures decreases. It’s a bit like pruning a shrub to encourage it to add growth and look bushier. Activities that put stress on bones stimulate extra deposits of calcium and nudge bone-forming cells into action. The tugging and pushing on bone that occur during strength training in particular provide the stress, which improves the quality of the bone matter.

Even weight-bearing aerobic exercise, like walking or running, can help your bones, but there are a couple of caveats. Generally, higher impact activities such as running, hiking, tennis, climbing stairs, and jumping rope have a more pronounced effect on bone than lower impact aerobics. And keep in mind that only those bones that bear the load of the exercise will benefit. For example, walking or running protects only the bones in your lower body, including your hips.

Weight-bearing exercise can mean exercises that use your own body weight, too—not necessarily just those with equipment such as weights or machines.

The key is to keep the activity challenging, says lead researcher and kinesiology scientist Larry Tucker, PhD, at Brigham Young University. If someone is a regular walker, then just walking probably won’t help improve bone density. But incorporating elevation or jump-roping along with other challenges to the regimen will help.

“If you’re always doing exactly the same thing and never increase the workload, you won’t improve,” Tucker says in an interview. “Bone is a lot like muscle—it responds to the strains placed upon it.”

In a study1 Tucker conducted that was published in the American Journal of Health Promotion, sixty women ages twenty-five to fifty were split into three groups. The first group did light stretching only; the second group performed ten jumps with thirty seconds in between jumps twice daily; and the third group performed twenty jumps in a similar fashion. After the sixteen weeks, the women’s measured hip bone mineral density was significantly greater in the jumping groups than in the control group.

As levels of estrogen and progesterone lower during perimenopause and menopause, this also leads to a slowing down of metabolism. The upshot is a decrease in muscle mass, resulting in fewer calories being burned. (While muscle doesn’t directly burn fat, the more muscle mass you have, the higher your resting metabolic rate.) This means that—without any further exercising—women with more muscle typically burn more calories throughout the day.

“When you are strength training, you are structuring a bigger engine for burning fat,” explains Edward Laskowski, M.D., at the Mayo Clinic. “It’s like building a V8 engine instead of a four-cylinder engine.”

About half of women report trouble sleeping during perimenopause, compared with 42 percent before the menopausal transition began. Difficulty staying asleep is the most common complaint among women of a certain age, along with waking up too early and frequently getting up to pee (urinary incontinence is another fun symptom).

At the root of these problems are changes in hormones. The same fluctuations that cause hot flashes and night sweats also result in our waking up during the night. Even women who don’t have hot flashes say their sleep is worse during this phase of life. One potential reason is that the brain becomes more active during sleep during perimenopause and menopause, which makes sleep lighter and leads to a lessened quality of sleep. Seasons also play a role: perimenopausal women have more problems sleeping in the summer than in the winter, when they also have more hot flashes and night sweats.

The impact of lousy sleep goes beyond just a poor night’s rest. Insufficient sleep can have an adverse effect on all kinds of health conditions, including cardiovascular disease, cognitive impairments, and mental health issues.

What’s also clear is that exercise can help. According to a 2013 study published in the monthly journal Sleep, of 339 women in various stages of menopause, those who had clear commitments to exercise in the five or so years preceding the one-month study showed significantly better sleep than those who didn’t. (The exercise modalities in that study were mostly aerobic, says lead researcher Christopher Kline, PhD, at the University of Pittsburgh.)

“Exercise is the most transformative thing you can do for your brain today,” says neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki, PhD, in a 2017 TED talk, who says to think of working out as a “supercharged 401(k) for your brain.”

Our brains experience changes during menopause, including drops in gray and white matter which leads to what many women feel to be cognitive slide, or “brain fog.” Research shows that over 60 percent of menopausal women experience these cognitive slips.

And while the good news is that these effects are often temporary and that women’s brains eventually stabilize, there are steps women can take in the perimenopausal period—and exercise is a big part of it. The reason: You can’t engage the body without engaging the mind. We are thinking when we work out—counting reps, self-correcting or tweaking position or posture, and engaging a mind-muscle connection. Exercise even has a meditative effect, and mindfulness is an important way to counter brain fog. A large part of the brain—about 82 percent of total gray matter volume3—can stand to benefit from physical activity, according to research.

Exercise has measurable benefits for the brain, including improved focus, memory, and reaction time. Over the long term, regular exercise can even change your brain’s physiology, helping produce new brain cells in the hippocampus. In other words, regular exercise has a protective anti-aging effect on the brain, stimulating the brain to develop a more robust hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, those areas most susceptible to neurodegenerative disease and cognitive declines in aging. And while working out doesn’t necessarily mean you can prevent or cure dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, it can help delay the symptoms of those diseases.

A 2017 study of more than 5,800 adults ages twenty to eighty-four found that people who ran a minimum of thirty to forty minutes, five days a week, had an almost nine-year advantage in biological aging at the cellular level. That advantage is related to the size of telomeres, which, according lead researcher Tucker, are the end caps of chromosomes.

“Each time cells divide, they tend to lose telomeres,” Tucker explains. “So telomeres getting shorter over time is one of the best predictors of how old a person is. Chronological age is highly related to the length of telomeres.”

But in addition age, he says, lifestyle also greatly influences the length telomeres. And Tucker found that physical activity also contributed to longer telomeres, while other factors such as obesity and smoking shortened them. The length of telomeres is “about perfect in its prediction of what a healthy lifestyle factor is,” he says. The fact that regular exercise contributed to longer telomeres also meant that it slowed down aging.

Strength training releases proteins that generate new connections in the brain, which have a powerful effect on cognitive function from memory to reaction time. It also stimulates the release of irisin, a hormone that improves cognitive function. On episode 87 of Hit Play Not Pause, neurophysiologist Louisa Nicola says, “You only have to strength train three days a week to get these effects. You can literally change the function and the structure of your brain by resistance training alone.”