You’re Strength Training — But Are You Actually Building Enough Muscle?

I spend a lot of time thinking, talking, and writing about muscle. And with strength training finally getting the attention it deserves, more women are thinking about how much muscle they have, whether they’re getting stronger, and how to build more of it.

But there’s one part of the conversation I think we’re still missing: How do you know if you actually have enough muscle?

We can track the weights we’re lifting, watch our strength improve, or even get a DEXA scan to see how much lean mass we’re carrying. What’s harder to answer is how much muscle we should be building now to support our health 10, 20, or even 40 years from now.

And it turns out that may be worth thinking about much earlier than we realize.

A new 2026 JAMA study1 adds to a growing body of research linking strength with longevity in women. One of the findings that stood out to physical therapist Shannon Ritchey, P.T., DPT, was that the relationship between strength and mortality remained even after researchers accounted for participants’ overall physical activity.

“Being active is incredibly important, but it may not be the whole picture,” Ritchey tells mindbodygreen. “Two women can both be active, but the stronger woman may have an advantage when it comes to longevity.”

This is where things get a little tricky.

There isn't one ideal amount of muscle every woman should have, and Ritchey is careful about using the term undermuscled too broadly. Clinical cutoffs for low muscle mass are largely designed to identify people at risk for conditions such as sarcopenia. They weren't created to tell a healthy 30- or 40-year-old woman how much muscle she should ideally be carrying for longevity.

But we also know muscle mass tends to decline as we get older if we're not actively giving the body a reason to maintain it. For Ritchey, that means the bar for a younger, healthy woman shouldn't simply be whether she can climb a flight of stairs or get off the floor without difficulty.

Instead, she suggests looking at your trajectory.

Are you regularly strength training your major muscle groups? Are you challenging them sufficiently? Are you lifting more or getting stronger than you were a year ago?

If the answer is no, you may not notice any obvious consequences right now. But that doesn't mean it's worth waiting until you do.

“There isn't a simple at-home test that can tell a healthy 30- or 40-year-old woman whether she has ‘enough’ muscle,” Ritchey says. “Muscle and strength loss happen gradually.”

Eventually, everyday things may start to feel harder: running across the street to catch a light, picking up your kids, lifting a heavy suitcase into the car. Ritchey's point is that we shouldn't have to wait for those moments to start intentionally building strength.

This was one of my favorite ways Ritchey described muscle during our conversation.

We spend decades putting money into retirement accounts because we know we'll want those resources later. Muscle deserves a similar long-term mindset.

Ritchey notes that muscle mass generally begins declining sometime in our 30s when we're not actively maintaining or building it. So rather than waiting until perimenopause or later life to suddenly get serious about strength, our 20s and 30s can be valuable decades for building a reserve.

“If muscle loss begins around 30, that's when we should start seriously prioritizing it,” she says. “The more physical capacity you develop and maintain throughout adulthood, the better positioned you are when age-related declines eventually occur.”

I like this framing because it shifts strength training away from something we do for an immediate result. You're not just training for the body you have this summer or even this decade. You're building capacity that you want to carry with you.

It's easy to think about muscle in terms of what it allows you to lift, but its role in the body goes much further than that.

Muscle is metabolically active tissue and one of the major places our bodies send glucose after we eat. Contracting our muscles also increases glucose uptake, which is part of the reason strength training and simply using our muscles regularly can be so beneficial for metabolic health.

Muscle and strength also support our bones. When muscles contract, they place force on the skeleton, and resistance training gives bones the mechanical stimulus they need to adapt and stay strong.

Then there's the physical reserve muscle gives us. Illness, injury, surgery, and periods of inactivity can all affect muscle and physical function. Having greater strength and capacity going into those periods may leave you better equipped to handle them.

For a long time, women's fitness has been heavily centered around what happens during a workout. How many calories did you burn? How much did you sweat? How sore were you the next morning? Did the workout leave you completely exhausted?

Ritchey thinks that's part of the reason many women may have spent years exercising consistently without necessarily building much muscle.

“For decades, we sold women exercise as a way to burn calories and take up less space,” she says. “We told them to eat less, weigh less, sweat more, and choose the workout that burned the most calories. Meanwhile, intentionally building muscle was often marketed to men.”

But a workout being hard doesn't automatically mean it's giving your muscles a strong reason to grow.

“You can spend years doing very hard workouts, sweating, burning calories, and feeling exhausted without giving your muscles a strong enough reason to grow,” Ritchey says.

She prefers a different question: What adaptation did this workout create?

That's a much more useful way to evaluate your routine. A long run may be building cardiovascular endurance. A yoga class might improve mobility, balance, or body awareness. All of those adaptations have value. But if your goal is to build muscle, your training needs to actually provide a muscle-building stimulus.

And simply feeling tired afterward isn't proof that it did.

There's no single test that can give every woman a definitive yes or no, but there are a few measurements that can provide useful context.

One place to start is grip strength, which is often used as a simple proxy for overall strength. In research settings, it’s typically measured with a handheld dynamometer—you squeeze the device as hard as you can, and your result can be compared with averages for your age and sex.

Women tend to reach peak grip strength in their 30s, averaging around 30 kilograms, according to Ritchey. But you don’t necessarily need a dynamometer to get a general sense of how your grip is doing. Everyday tasks like comfortably carrying heavy grocery bags, opening a stubborn jar, or hanging from a pull-up bar can give you some practical feedback on your grip and functional strength.

Just keep in mind that grip strength isn’t a perfect stand-in for how strong you are overall. Hand size, for example, can affect dynamometer results, which is why Ritchey sees it as one useful data point rather than a definitive measure of whether you have “enough” muscle.

If you have access to a DEXA scan, Ritchey also likes looking at appendicular lean mass index, or ALMI. ALMI looks at the lean mass in your arms and legs and adjusts it for height.

For American women in their 30s, Ritchey says an ALMI around 6.9 kg/m² is roughly average, while approximately 7.7 to 7.8 kg/m² falls around the upper quartile. Above 8 kg/m² is toward the higher end of the distribution.

There's another reason Ritchey thinks we need to be talking about muscle right now: the rapid rise of GLP-1 medications. These medications have made significant weight loss possible for millions of people and can offer substantial health benefits. But weight loss can include lean tissue along with body fat.

Ritchey notes that with significant weight loss, around 25% of the weight lost can come from lean mass. “My concern isn't the medication itself,” she says. “My concern is rapid weight loss without a plan to preserve muscle.”

That's why she believes resistance training and adequate protein should be part of the conversation from the beginning rather than something introduced after substantial weight loss has already occurred.

Maybe you haven't spent your 20s or 30s progressively strength training. Maybe you're already in your 40s, 50s, or beyond and only recently started thinking seriously about muscle.

You haven't missed your chance.

“This is one of the most encouraging messages I wish more women heard,” Ritchey says. “Muscle remains remarkably trainable with age.”

Resistance-training studies2 have found muscle growth and significant improvements in strength among older adults, including people in their 70s and beyond. Aging can affect the rate or magnitude of those adaptations, but it doesn't eliminate them.

Ritchey is especially wary of the fear-based messaging women often encounter around menopause—that once estrogen begins declining, building muscle suddenly becomes dramatically more difficult or requires an entirely new approach.

“The fundamentals still work,” she says. “Provide the muscle with an adequate stimulus, recover, repeat, and progressively challenge it over time.”

Thankfully, it's simpler than social media can make it seem.

Start with meaningful stimulus. Choose an exercise that effectively targets the muscle you're trying to train and take the set close enough to muscular failure that the last several reps feel genuinely challenging.

That doesn't mean you need to lift incredibly heavy weights.

Ritchey says you can build muscle using heavier weights for roughly four to eight reps, moderate weights for around nine to 15 reps, or lighter weights for approximately 16 to 30 reps. The common denominator is that you're sufficiently challenging the muscle.

If you can easily do more than 30 reps, the load is probably too light to provide much of a muscle-building stimulus, even if it burns.

Then there's volume. Ritchey's programming at Evlo generally includes around four to eight high-quality sets per muscle group per week. More isn't automatically better, particularly if adding more makes it harder to recover or stay consistent.

If there's one practical shift I'd take from this conversation, it's to start paying attention to whether you're actually getting stronger.

Ritchey's advice for women who have never intentionally trained to build muscle is simple: Stop judging workouts by calories burned, sweat, soreness, or exhaustion. Strength train at least two to three times a week using exercises that feel good on your joints and allow you to challenge the intended muscles. Eat enough protein to support that training.

Then write down what you're lifting.

If you're using 15-pound dumbbells today, what can you use three months from now? Can you perform more reps with the same weight? Can you control a movement that once felt difficult?

Those changes aren't as instantly gratifying as watching a calorie number flash across a fitness tracker, but they tell you something much more useful about the adaptation you're creating.

Ritchey’s retirement account analogy might be the simplest way to think about all of this: You don’t wait until retirement to start saving, and you don’t need to wait until muscle loss becomes noticeable to start building strength.

There’s no perfect amount of muscle every woman needs to have. But we can start accumulating that reserve now by strength training consistently, challenging our muscles, eating enough protein, and tracking whether we’re actually getting stronger.