The wonder of weightlifting | Jaime Seeman (re-release)

Jaime Seeman argues that building muscle should be treated as a health measure, not primarily as a way to achieve a particular appearance. She points to heart disease, cancer, and stroke as the CDC’s top three killers of women and describes metabolic disease as a major contributing factor. In her view, building muscle may help reduce women’s risk of death, particularly by countering the age-related loss of muscle. She says people lose about 1% of muscle size on average after age 40, a decline known as sarcopenia.

Seeman calls resistance training the only non-pharmacological intervention consistently shown to offset age-related declines in skeletal muscle mass, strength, and power. She describes a 2021 study of women aged 65 and older who did body-weight and resistance-band training three times a week for 16 weeks. The women in the treatment group improved in strength, functional fitness, grip strength, and gait speed. The example, she says, shows that strength training need not begin with heavy weights or demanding equipment to produce useful benefits.

Beginners can start at their current ability, Seeman says, and resistance can come from lifting weights, groceries, children, or one’s own body weight. She emphasizes that the amount of exercise needed for benefit can be small, while greater frequency, time, and effort in strength training are associated with better body composition. Seeman also argues that women can handle more training volume without overtraining because, in her account, they produce more estrogen, fatigue less quickly, and recover faster. Her message is to begin where one is rather than treating heavy lifting as a prerequisite.

Seeman says cultural myths about women’s appearance and exercise help keep women out of weight rooms. She cites a Journal of Exercise Science finding that for every woman using a gym’s free-weight section, 27 men were using it. She counters fears of becoming excessively muscular by saying that such a result takes years of serious training and concerted effort. She adds that a bodybuilder’s physique like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s also involves steroids. Her argument separates strength training for health from pursuing a bodybuilding appearance.

Her own history illustrates the tension between strength and expectations about women’s bodies. As a high-school sophomore, Seeman was offered a modeling contract as a size-10 plus-size model but turned it down. She later played NCAA college softball and was named weightlifter of the year twice. Although physical strength gave her confidence, comments about her muscular body also made her feel different.

After a close friend died suddenly at 29, Seeman says she confronted her own mortality and felt an urgency to improve her health. She was feeling weak and tired, and identified muscle as what she was missing before returning to gym training. Two years after setting out to regain her health, she competed in Titan Games and Mrs. America in the same year. For Seeman, that journey reinforces the episode’s central idea: strength training is a way to build health and confidence, not merely to change how a body looks.