🏋🏻‍♀️ Why We’re Bullish on Barbells 

To be abundantly clear upfront: all lifting is good lifting in our book. Resistance training is among the best moves a woman can make for her health and longevity and, though the numbers appear to be growing, far too few 40+ women (just about 24% of women 45 to 64 according to 2020 CDC data) are regularly meeting the muscle-strengthening guidelines to lift at least twice a week. 

I imagine those numbers are somewhat higher now six years later, but they’re certainly still too low. This blog by Hit Play Not Pause podcast regular, Dr. Carla DiGirolamo and Heather Hausenblas, PhD, dives into some of the commonly stated barriers, like lack of time, cost, and feeling intimated by the weight room that get in the way even when women say they want to lift. 

Which is why we host Feisty Strong Retreats and have a Feisty Strong Barbell Club: it helps women learn to lift in a super supportive environment, so they can have confidence whether they’re lifting at home, at their local big box facility, or the hotel gym. 

While we like and use all the tools—dumbbells, kettlebells, machines, body weight, etc.—we encourage incorporating barbells (the long metal bar with weight plates on each end that you likely see at the gym) because they’re one of the most efficient tools out there. Barbells just make it easy to move heavier weights and to recruit more muscle groups with each lift, which makes them especially effective for building maximal strength…and, as we find, confidence.

Health & Performance Benefits of Heavy Loads

We also encourage women to progress to lifting heavy loads for compound lifts (e.g., squats, deadlifts, presses)—all great barbell movements that involve multiple muscle groups. Including heavy strength training as part of your routine raises your absolute strength ceiling, which underpins long‑term power and injury resilience.

That sums up what we want for all the active, performance-minded women in our community. While research shows we can build strength, muscle size, and endurance across a wide range of rep ranges and loads, heavy loads produce the most robust gains in maximal strength. As this 2025 review illustrates, heavy and very heavy strength training can help mitigate age‑ and disease‑related declines in muscle strength and is still underutilized, especially for older adults.

Neuromuscular Benefits

When you lift a heavy load (≥80% of your 1‑RM), your brain recruits a large proportion of high‑threshold motor units—those responsible for explosive power—early in the first rep, especially when you’re trying to move the weight quickly and powerfully. With moderate loads (roughly 60–80% of your 1‑RM), the nervous system typically starts with lower‑threshold units and progressively calls in higher‑threshold ones later in the set as fatigue builds.

Training with maximal or near‑maximal loads tends to produce some of the largest gains in motor unit discharge rates (firing frequency) during the first tens to hundreds of milliseconds of a contraction. In short, your brain learns to send stronger signals faster, boosting the rate of force development and helping with rapid balance corrections, jumps, sprints, and other powerful movements.

Lifting moderate loads explosively—with the intent to move them as fast as possible—also provides meaningful neural benefits, improving recruitment of high‑threshold units and early‑phase force production, often with less joint stress than maximal loads. Heavy weights still offer a unique stimulus for the nervous system and connective tissues, especially for maximal strength. That’s why it’s good to have a strength program that includes a variety of reps, ranges, and intensities.

Bone Benefits 

Heavier loads are also good for building bones, which is a key benefit for women as they go through the menopause transition, which is marked by an acceleration of bone loss. Research finds that while lower intensity resistance training (i.e, 16 repetitions at 40% of 1 repetition maximum) can stabilize bone density, high intensity resistance training (i.e., 8 repetitions at 80% of 1 repetition maximum) improved bone indicators in the femur neck and the lumbar spine among postmenopausal women with osteopenia.

The LIFTMOR study found women with low bone mass performing twice‑weekly, 30‑minute sessions of high‑intensity resistance and impact training (5 sets of 5 reps at >85% 1RM) improved lumbar spine BMD by nearly 3%, femoral neck BMD by about 0.3%, and cortical thickness at the femoral neck by roughly 14%, all while gaining function and posture with excellent safety and adherence.

For more on heavy lifting for 40+ bone health, you can check out the Hit Play Not Pause podcast we did with Dr. Lisa Moore, DPT, founder of Brick House Bones, who after a surprise osteopenia diagnosis of her own, rebuilt her bone density by 3% in a single year using this approach. 

Build Your Brain

One of the coolest emerging areas in resistance training research right now focuses on how building strength and muscle benefits your brain. 

A new study using brain‑age “clocks” found that resistance training (moderate and heavy) slowed brain aging by about –1.4 to –2.3 years over two years in older adults. The study also reports that heavy training increased prefrontal cortex connectivity and that effects were global, not just in isolated networks. Bottom line: lifting weights, and including some heavy loads, really can be brain training.

Endurance Sports Performance 

When I was mountain bike racing, lots of coaches actively discouraged endurance athletes like myself from lifting weights so we didn’t end up with more muscle than was productive to push around for hours (or for stage racers like myself, days). Today, heavy strength training is commonly recommended for sports like cycling and running. 

Reports like this suggest that integrating heavy strength training into cycling endurance training can improve cycling efficiency and anaerobic power. Similarly, reviews like this one find that high load training and plyometric training may improve running economy (i.e., how much energy/oxygen your body uses to run at a given pace). 

High‑intensity resistance training, like lifting heavier weights, can improve joint flexibility and range of motion—the amount a joint can move—by reducing tissue stiffness and increasing how much stretch a person can tolerate, both big benefits for active midlife women, who need both strength and mobility to stay in the game.

There are also less easily quantifiable benefits. Sonya Looney, a World Champion Athlete, TEDx speaker, and mental performance expert who I had the pleasure of racing against, recently made a post about how she started powerlifting based on the recommendations she’d seen in this community, and among other benefits she talks about, is really enjoying the power up heavy lifting is giving her:

“I am seeing huge benefits in my sports and even in my posture. I have had to give up some time building aerobic fitness which was initially hard. I have lost some aerobic bike fitness (a short term choice to build a long term foundation) that I know I can get back.

In its place, I have more explosive power (steep climbs and difficult technical power moves are much easier), and I know I am supporting my health span - I want to still be crushing at 80.

I wanted to share in case you’re on the fence. This is the second biggest lifestyle change I’ve made apart from going plant-based in 2013.” 

We’ll be having Sonya on the show to talk more about it, but these are the benefits I noticed, nearly immediately…and what keeps many of us who would rather be on the trails devoting time to the gym. 

Again, priority one is just getting lifting, however that looks like for you! Once you’ve got a foundation and lifting habit formed, progressing to higher loads and learning barbell lifts, are a great way to get extra benefits. For more on how to get started on all of this, you can check out our Ready to Start Barbell Training post here.