Practice
Strength training for women has spent two decades being marketed wrong. Here’s how we approach it, and why every woman past 35 should be doing it.
Walk past a typical commercial gym’s “women’s fitness” offering and you’ll see roughly the same menu it offered in 2008: dance cardio, light dumbbells, “tone and sculpt”, the occasional pilates reformer. The marketing is pink. The weights are colour-coded. The unspoken assumption is that women want to take up less space.
This is, charitably, two decades behind the science.
Heavy resistance training is the most powerful intervention available to women planning to live well into their 80s and 90s. Not as a phase. Not as a compromise. As the foundation.
What changes when women start training heavy
Bone density. Women lose bone mass faster than men, especially in the perimenopausal and post-menopausal years. The most effective non-pharmacological intervention is heavy resistance training combined with impact loading. Pilates is gentle. Walking is gentle. Heavy squats are not gentle. Heavy squats are what build hip and spine bone density that holds.
Muscle mass and metabolic health. Skeletal muscle is the largest endocrine organ in the body. The more lean mass you carry, the better your insulin sensitivity, your resting metabolic rate, and your ability to maintain body composition through hormonal changes. Light dumbbells don’t move this needle.
Joint stability and posture. Pull, hinge, squat, press, the four foundational movement patterns, are what hold the body upright through decades. Trained well, they make a 70-year-old move like a 50-year-old. Untrained, the loss is steady and silent.
Confidence under load. This is the one that surprises people. The first time you deadlift your own bodyweight, something in how you carry yourself in the rest of your life shifts. This isn’t mystical, it’s a real psychological response to demonstrated competence.
Why women come to us
Most of our female members tell us a version of the same story: they’ve done classes, tried HIIT, joined and unjoined a chain gym, and never quite found a place that took their training seriously. They want to lift heavy. They don’t want to do it surrounded by an audience. They want a trainer who actually knows their cycle, their sleep, and their week, not a stranger every Tuesday.
So we built it. Both our Notting Hill and Chelsea studios have private training rooms with certified female senior trainers, available on request. The programmes are heavy. The coaching is patient. The progression is decades long. The room is yours and your trainer’s, with the door closed.
What progression looks like
Year one: foundation. We rebuild the four patterns, add load conservatively, get body composition and recovery markers stable. Most members add lean mass and improve cardiovascular markers in the first quarter. Strength benchmarks roughly double in twelve months.
Year three: this is when the long game starts to compound. Bone density measurements (DEXA, separate from us) come back markedly improved. Members report sleeping deeper, recovering faster, and, importantly, carrying themselves differently in the world.
Year five and beyond: this is the population that, in their 60s and 70s, will be carrying their own grandchildren, walking the South Downs without thinking about it, and not having “I used to” conversations.
The honest invitation
Strength training, properly programmed, is not a phase you’re too old or too unfit for. It’s the most concrete thing you can do this decade for the next four. If you’d like to talk about what that would look like for you, apply for a Discovery Call.
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