Here are five ways that strength training can help critical things that typically happen in women’s bodies as a result of aging, and the ways that strength training can help counteract the effects of time and promote a stronger life for them.
- Stimulating Satellite Cells
Satellite cells are the stem cells responsible for regenerating muscle tissue. 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. muscular atrophy is a sign of aging, then strength training is a key way to make your body look and feel younger.
- Building Better Bones
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.
The key is to keep the activity challenging, says lead researcher and kinesiology scientist Larry Tucker 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.”
- Boosting Metabolism
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 at the Mayo Clinic. “It’s like building a V8 engine instead of a four-cylinder engine.”
- Promoting Better Sleep
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.
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 at the University of Pittsburgh.)
My reasons for prioritizing sleep are multiple. In addition to the fact that poor sleep can ruin your day, it’s also important for the process of muscle growth. During sleep, the body produces human growth hormone (HGH), which is essential for muscle growth and development, repair of muscle fibers, and metabolism. Some studies indicate that a lack of sleep can decrease protein synthesis, potentially contributing to the loss of muscle mass and function. The right amount of sleep can vary from person to person, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that adults get at least seven hours each night. (The CDC also says that one in three adults does not get enough sleep.)
- Improving Brain Health
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.
Excerpted from LIFT by Anne Marie Chaker, published on June 17, 2025, by Avery, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Anne Marie Chaker.