Lift weights for 60 minutes a week

Why your muscles matter

Muscle does more than move you around. It is one of the main places your body stores and uses sugar from your blood. Adults tend to lose muscle and strength gradually from middle age onward unless they keep using them, and resistance training is the main way to slow that loss.

Public health guidelines, including those from the World Health Organization, recommend muscle-strengthening activities on two or more days a week. Surveys suggest many adults do none at all. That gap is why a small weekly target can matter over the years.

What a short session does

Resistance training means any exercise where your muscles work against a weight, a band or your own body. Over weeks, it builds and keeps lean muscle, which helps with everyday tasks like carrying shopping or climbing stairs. A 2012 review of training studies reported that about 10 weeks of lifting added roughly 1.4 kg of lean weight and removed about 1.8 kg of fat in adults.

You don't need heavy weights. Use a load you can lift with good form for roughly 8 to 15 repetitions, until the last few feel hard. Dumbbells, resistance bands and bodyweight moves such as squats and push-ups all count. The same review linked regular training with lower blood pressure and better blood sugar control.

What the research found

The 2022 review, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, pooled studies that followed adults for years. People who did muscle-strengthening activities had about a 10 to 17% lower risk of early death, heart disease, cancer and type 2 diabetes than people who did none. People who combined lifting with aerobic exercise, like brisk walking or cycling, had about a 40% lower risk of early death than people who did neither.

A common question is whether more is better. For early death, heart disease and cancer, the extra benefit faded beyond about an hour a week, and the data on much larger amounts were thin. More training still builds strength and size, so the hour is a sensible target rather than a ceiling on fitness. For mood, a 2018 meta-analysis of 33 randomized trials found resistance training reduced depressive symptoms in adults, with a moderate effect.

One limit is worth knowing. The long-term health studies relied on what people reported about their own exercise. They show links, and they can't prove that lifting alone caused the lower risk.

Fitting lifting into your week

An hour a week, split in two, fits most diaries as two 30-minute sessions on days that aren't back to back. If you lift on Tuesday and Friday after work, you have your hour done by Friday dinner. Keep your dumbbells or band where you will trip over them. Gear hidden at the back of a cupboard has a way of staying there.

On a bad week, do the easy version: two 15-minute rounds of squats, push-ups and rows still give you 30 minutes. Keep up any walking or sport you already do, since strength and aerobic exercise seem to work best together. After a few months, you become someone who lifts twice a week without debating it. If you have a heart condition, uncontrolled blood pressure or an injury, check with a doctor or physiotherapist first, and stop any move that causes sharp pain. Which two evenings this week already have 30 free minutes in them?

References

• Momma, H., et al. (2022). Muscle-strengthening activities are associated with lower risk and mortality in major non-communicable diseases: a systematic review and meta-analysis of cohort studies. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 56(13), 755-763. doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2021-105061
• Gordon, B. R., et al. (2018). Association of efficacy of resistance exercise training with depressive symptoms: meta-analysis and meta-regression analysis of randomized clinical trials. JAMA Psychiatry, 75(6), 566-576. doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2018.0572
• Westcott, W. L. (2012). Resistance training is medicine: effects of strength training on health. Current Sports Medicine Reports, 11(4), 209-216. doi.org/10.1249/JSR.0b013e31825dabb8