Weightlifting makes older women leaner, stronger and more mobile

Women in their 50s to 80s learned to safely deadlift 50 kilograms or more in a study, making them stronger, leaner and more mobile. The finding fits with growing evidence that older women, who have traditionally steered clear of heavy weights, can reap major benefits from lifting them. “We’ve done research on why most older women don’t do strength training and some are worried about getting injured or having a heart attack, or they haven’t grown up with the culture of going to the gym,” says Elissa Burton at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, who wasn’t involved in the latest study. “They say: ‘what would I wear? Are there only going to be young people? What would I do when I get there?’ But actually, it’s one of the best things you can do to live independently for as long as possible.” In the study, led by Juezhen Zhang at the University of Taipei in Taiwan, 32 postmenopausal women aged 52 to 84 were recruited from local communities and randomly allocated to participate in a strength-training programme or to maintain their usual lifestyles. Advertisement Those in the strength-training group were shown how to use a hexagonal barbell, a six-sided frame that goes around the body and has weights on the side. It aligns the weight with the user’s centre of gravity to reduce the risk of lower back injuries when lifting it. For 24 weeks, the women did two supervised sessions per week involving multiple sets of deadlifts. These were made up of bending down, lifting the barbell off the floor, standing to bring it up to hip level, then lowering it back down again. Over the course of the study, the women in the strength-training group lost fat and gained lean muscle mass around their middles, while simultaneously losing fat from their thighs and buttocks. This was paralleled by improvements in strength: the maximum amount they could deadlift five times in a row increased from an average of 45 to 58 kilograms. By the end, the women also wobbled less while standing with their eyes closed and were able to walk longer distances in 6 minutes, indicating better balance and mobility. In contrast, those asked to maintain their usual lifestyles didn’t experience any improvements. “Accompanied by an exceptional training attendance rate of 89.6 per cent and zero adverse events over the 24-week period, these findings provide groundbreaking evidence that hexagonal barbell deadlift training represents a highly safe, feasible, and clinically meaningful intervention strategy to counteract age-related functional decline in older females,” Zhang’s team wrote in the study’s paper. Having better strength, balance and mobility makes it easier to perform everyday movements, like getting in and out of a car and lifting oneself off the toilet, says Burton, who has researched other strength-training programmes for older adults. “We’ve had women come in using a walking stick, and by the end of the programme, they no longer need it,” she says. “We also had a woman with fibromyalgia [a long-term condition that causes pain all over the body], and after a 12-week strength training programme, she said it was the first time she could do things without pain.” Other studies have found that older women who do regular strength training live longer, have lower risks of falls and are protected against cognitive decline. Most strength-training programmes for older adults involve the use of machine weights – like leg, chest and shoulder-press machines – because they have fixed ranges of motion that make them easy to use. But Zhang’s team believes that lifting free weights, like barbells and dumbbells, is probably more beneficial because it requires activation and coordination of more muscles, including stabiliser muscles in the core that are important for real-life tasks. Burton says older women who are interested in doing strength training for the first time should start with a qualified trainer to make sure they perform the exercises correctly and don’t injure themselves. “There are more and more programmes being set up for older adults, which is great because it makes it easier to go when you’re with like-minded people,” she says. Experimental Gerontology DOI: 10.1016/j.exger.2026.113246