⚖️ "Deadlift 1.5x Your Body Weight Or Else"

Addressing social media standards for strength training.

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One of the best documented benefits of strength training is building bone mass. It's a known fact that strength training improves your bone density over time by putting pressure on your bones. Today, I want to talk about an important factor for lots of women, especially as we age - osteoporosis.

Tons of us have seen women in our lives get older and struggle with higher risks of fractures due to the natural loss of bone mass that happens when we don't train. It can be tempting to go to extremes to try and feel safe as we age, by holding ourselves to standards like "deadlift 1.5 times your body weight." But let's discuss why this isn't the best approach.

Yes, strength training is really helpful when it comes to preserving and building bone mass. But how does this actually work?

The fact is that if you're training at all, you're at least maintaining your bone density.

That continued, consistent pressure works, and you can trust that. At worst – assuming you don't add heavier weight, but you keep working out – you're keeping the bone mass you have. Maintenance is work.

There's a lot of damaging messaging on social media that will hold you to standards that make it seem like this isn't that case. That you have to continuously add weight and if you don't, something horrible is going to happen to you. Those extremes don't work for anyone.

To say that every woman needs to be lifting a certain amount of weight is flat out incorrect. Each body has different needs and a different range of strength a person can work with. A universal standard flattens things like genetic predisposition to building muscle, ongoing lifestyle factors that can impact strength building, and special circumstances like health conditions and stressful events.

In addition to everyone needing something different, there are tons of other harmful myths floating around that make it seem like there's a deadline after which you can no longer gain strength. This isn't true either. You can always gain muscle. You can always rebuild bone through strength training. There is no cutoff. Yes, you start losing muscle after a certain age, but you can always work against that. At any age.

So next time you see someone online telling you that you need to be achieving a certain thing by a certain age, remember that there's only one standard you need to be worried about: the heaviest that you can lift on any given day. You are the standard for yourself, and no one else.

With you as we ignore the scary Tiktoks,
Dana