‘My upper arms are like jelly’: can I learn to love weightlifting in six weeks?

As a middle-aged woman, you would have to be living under a rock (one you’re too weak to lift, maybe) not to know you should be strength training. The headlines just keep coming, ever more persuasive. “Lifting heavy” builds muscle mass and improves bone density; it’s good for your heart, mood and sleep.

I don’t do it, though. Why not? I suppose because I’m lazy, fear gyms and never really feel the need to be stronger (except when I’m trying to lift 20kg sacks of bird food). But I would like to age without crumbling into a heap of dust, could probably do with a mood boost and I’ve heard good things about this “sleep” business. So fine, I give in. Can I learn to LHS (that’s “lift heavy shit”) in six weeks – and will I like it?

Week one

The first hurdle is wrestling with a sports bra. What the hell are they made of – bungee cord? I haven’t worn one – or been in a gym – since my mid-20s, so I’m spiralling on arrival at Energise (a nearby local authority health centre).

Thankfully, trainer Kelly McTighe is my age (49), fun and hugely encouraging. She asks what I want to achieve and I say I want to get stronger, and not fall over and break my hip (secretly, I want arms like Nicole Kidman, too. I’m relieved when McTighe later tells me, “There’s nothing wrong with having a vanity goal”). McTighe coaches people with long-term health conditions referred to the gym by the NHS, meaning she can get anyone of any fitness level comfortable training. “Every gym should be accessible for every client,” she says.

The gym has been McTighe’s “happy place” since she was 14, but she understands how intimidating they can be; places “with big lads grunting and throwing things around and skinny little things”, as her client, Erica (69), puts it when she comes over for a chat. Energise isn’t like that – “We’ve been described as homely,” McTighe says. I spot a real range of ages, shapes and fitness levels, so only feel slightly self-conscious as McTighe gets me warming up on a cross-trainer and doing squats, leg raises and shoulder rolls before we hit the hard stuff.

There are almost infinite variations to how you can strength train – that’s partly what makes starting out so confusing – but basically, you challenge your muscles by lifting a heavy weight, usually around 8-12 times (those are “reps”). Then you take a break of around 60 seconds for your muscles to recover and do it again, usually twice more, making three “sets” total. The aim is to put the main muscle groups in the body under stress, with variations on pushing, pulling and pressing.

Why use actual weights and not just your body weight? After all, mine (and most beginners’) will be much more than we’re able to lift in a gym. Although you can get benefits without weights, the issue, according to personal trainer Asha Melanie, is that unweighted lower-body exercises (such as squats or lunges) tend to be fairly easy, while upper-body ones (pull-ups or push-ups) are advanced and hard to perform: “So it’s hard for someone who is starting out to just stick with body weight – there’s no middle ground – whereas with weights you’re able to bridge the gap and progressively overload in a safe and constructive way.”

As a starting point, McTighe gets me to try out a range of static weight machines: pulling things and pushing stuff. How to move and what to adjust is quite easy to grasp, even if you’re as mechanically challenged as I am; she says they are also “extremely safe – brilliant if you’re a bit worried”. Some exercises are much harder than others, though. As I drive home, my upper arms are quivering like jellies and, for the next two days, my legs are so sore I have to walk downstairs sideways, like a crab.

Week two

Our second session focuses on free weights – dumbbells, barbells, kettle bells – which, McTighe explains, demand more input from your body. “You’ve got to use multiple muscle groups to keep the weights moving how they should.” You’re aiming to lift the heaviest weight you can manage with “perfect form” (all your bits in the right place and not using momentum to lift) and McTighe recommends beginners get some supervision and guidance to learn the basic techniques: “It’s about being realistic and safe.” That doesn’t mean you need a pricey personal trainer. She says gym staff are often cautious about offending by offering unsolicited advice, but delighted to be asked for help.

With McTighe’s guidance, I do a range of dumbbell “lifts”, finding the right weight, then move on to barbell squats, weighted lunges and a kettlebell deadlift. Lifting reasonably heavy (for me) weights feels like a manageable, surprisingly fun challenge; it helps that McTighe is generous with her compliments, telling me I have “good body awareness”. It works. I’d do anything for her, I confide to Erica, as I leave. She laughs. “She’s got you in her spider’s web.” Training with McTighe took her from almost never leaving home and suffering acute health anxiety to working out five days a week. “It gave me a different perspective,” she says. “It’s been absolutely amazing”.

I’d like to understand why middle-aged women should lift heavy, so I ask Dr Stacy Sims – an exercise physiologist and the high priestess of midlife strength. Preserving muscle mass and bone density, she says, has real-world impacts rather than training being an end in itself. “What you do now impacts how you move, think, live in five, 10, 15 years plus.”

In peri and post-menopause, Sims explains, women lose the oestrogen and progesterone that combine to keep muscle and bone turnover and development going. Lifting heavy weights helps compensate by creating an external stress which stimulates the central nervous system and neuromuscular system into getting the body to build and preserve muscle mass and bone density.

But how do you work out how heavy to lift for all that to happen? “It takes a long time to be able to lift heavy loads well,” Sims warns, but for absolute beginners, “any extra load is going to give strength benefits”. Working out the right weight, you need to try to grasp the idea of “reps in reserve”, she says: that’s how many more reps you could have done with perfect form, which helps you work out when you should be using a heavier weight. Opinions on the ideal number of reps in reserve vary and depend on what you are trying to achieve (and “training to failure” – that’s until you can’t finish the rep you’re doing – is part of serious lifters’ routines), but if you have more than two reps in reserve, it’s probably time to try a heavier weight. McTighe’s advice to me is when I can do 12 or 15 reps (depending on the exercise) perfectly, go up.

I do my next session at a different Better gym – the nearest one to home, a five-minute cycle away. I force my younger son to join me and I’m glad I do: in a strange environment full of forbidding black machinery, it’s great being able to ask him where the leg press is and what I should be doing before we go our separate ways (me to the dainty 3kg dumbbells; him to do Bulgarian split squats with giant weights). When we get home, he tells me he couldn’t see me doing anything obviously wrong: high praise.

Week three

I follow McTighe’s advice for anyone suffering “gymtimidation” when I arrive for my sessions, using my warm-up time – “get your music on, get your breathing regulated” – to plan what to do based on what equipment is free. I loathe warming up – so boring – but at least this gives me something to think about.

You don’t necessarily need a gym to strength train, though. Anna Jenkins runs We Are Fit Attitude, a strength-training community of more than 200 women, from mid-40s up to 77. Some, she says, wanted to start strength training but didn’t feel comfortable in gyms or preferred a women-only environment; others had experienced a bruising loss of confidence around menopause. Her mixed-ability online (and in-person, in Tooting) strength-training sessions accommodate a whole spectrum of abilities, from women who need to train sitting down to seasoned heavy lifters. I ask her to ask her members what’s so good about strength training and their answers are a touching avalanche of enthusiasm: 72-year-old Ingrid says it has “transformed my life”; Donna, 56, calls it “a total gamechanger for how I see and feel about my body”. “I can lift a big heavy suitcase up a flight of stairs and KNOW that I can do that,” says 63-year-old Sheila. Wendy, 64, calls it “an act of love for my daughters”: she wants to be strong and healthy for them for as long as possible.

To my surprise, I’m enjoying the gym, using my midlife invisibility to indulge in people watching and eavesdropping. There’s the odd “big lad grunting and throwing things”, but also women of all ages, along with teenagers and wheelchair- and walker-users; people in rehab and with restricted mobility. Once you’re past the door, it’s the opposite of intimidating: actually, it’s pretty inspiring.

The routine McTighe devised for me takes roughly 45-60 mins, mostly because of the breaks. I love the breaks: in my chequered exercise history, nothing has ever involved having a regular little sit or stand around looking at my phone. Everyone’s doing it! It’s mandatory! Wonderful.

Week four

I’m starting to realise there’s a vast community of midlife women weightlifting, including many I know. My friend Alice, I discover, trains four times a week, deadlifts 90kg and squats 70kg. It was “one of those mad lockdown whims but with weights rather than sourdough”, she says, but something immediately clicked. “I liked learning how all the machines and bits of equipment worked and ‘conquering’ what seems like a very male environment.”

After a severe back injury stopped Bernice playing competitive volleyball, she became “very depressed”; getting into the gym and lifting weights helped her heal physically and mentally, “It literally kept me away from doctors.” Cheryl started weight training at 65. Peri- and post-menopausal weight gain and back and knee problems, she says, made her “slower and less flexible … less strong”; she struggled to carry her shopping upstairs. She started strength training with a coach last year and now she’s on a four-month solo tour round south-east Asia, carrying all her own luggage. “I have stamina. I’ve got muscle tone. I no longer feel afraid of falling, dependency or being house-bound. Building a strong old lady body is very rewarding.”

Rewarding feels like the right word. I’m starting to experiment with increasing the weight on some of my exercises and it’s so satisfying when I manage, like winning a game (I overhear one of my fellow newbies, a woman in her 70s, describe it as “competing against the machines”). Am I … having fun?

Week five

Social media has twigged I’m on a weights journey and is urging me to buy fancy dumbbells and offering advice on how to make my bench press more effective or why I should be doing weighted “glute bridges”.

I ask Melanie about this avalanche of strength content, some helpful; most baffling. “You’ve got to remember they’re writing these posts for clicks and likes and there’s often more nuance behind it,” she says. Rather than taking advice online, she recommends asking gym staff – or a trainer like her – for help. “They can tailor it to you as opposed to generalised advice.” Like McTighe, she’s keen to stress gym staff are delighted to be asked for help.

Melanie sorts out my ropey Romanian deadlift, suggests tweaks to other lifts and keeps my rests to a strict minute (I admit I’ve been extending my favourite part of my workout almost infinitely). She also shows me how to note down my weights and reps like a pro to track my progress. Having her on my case shows me I have been slightly half-arsing my routine, skipping bits I don’t much fancy. There’s definitely value in individual attention if you can afford it.

I’m managing to train three times a week, but wow, I am tired. The improved sleep I was promised is happening, but I’m also noticing that when I don’t eat enough, or I don’t rest, working out is harder. Effective strength training demands you take days off between sessions and feed yourself properly, regularly – I’m not necessarily good at that, but I’m gradually realising it’s non-negotiable.

Sims is adamant protein helps: she emails me the word in all caps with four exclamation marks, going on to explain that menopausal women need more of it to build muscle. I obey. “You’re eating a lot of tofu,” my husband notes, with French distaste, as I fry up another block. I don’t have much to show him for it yet – I might be deadlifting 20kg in the gym, but when I try and help him move a sack of bird seed claiming, absurdly, “I lift weights now”, I am completely useless.

“The gains in strength kind of creep up on you,” Melanie texts me when I moan about it. “Even if you’re not feeling it, I’m sure they’re there.”

Week six

I realise she’s right when I go back and show McTighe what I’ve achieved. From an admittedly very low base, I’ve increased my weight on every exercise on my programme; I’ve doubled how much I leg press and deadlifted 25kg (exhilarated to achieve this personal best, I asked my son his: “About 160kg, something like that?” Ah.)

I’m proud, and also sufficiently enthused to ask McTighe for tips on using the equipment on what I’ve identified as the “scary side” of the gym (the always-busy squat and deadlift racks). I know that, if I want to keep improving, I’ll have to get comfortable doing what I see people do in the gym all the time: asking for help. Given weight-training’s bro-y, narcissistic reputation, there’s a surprising amount of vulnerability, supporting and helping each other involved.

Checking my progress and setting me a new programme, McTighe says my upper body looks stronger. She’s right: I’m not Kidman-esque, but I have discovered I have triceps and there are dips in my shoulders that weren’t there before. My legs, too – despite everyone claiming it’s virtually “impossible to bulk up” as a middle-aged woman, my already-sturdy quads and hamstrings are definitely larger. As a survivor of 90s diet-and-tiny-body culture, I find this harder to love, but I’m out of step with the 2024 gym aesthetic: the lifters on social media, both men and women, want (or promise) big thighs and a “fat ass”.

It’s interesting to see how the desirable body type – at least in this community – is one that is strong and functional (albeit fixated on having a disproportionately enormous bottom). Someone I know tells me lifting weights and getting stronger reconciled her with her own body after the loss of her baby; many others describe a gradual but radical rewiring of brains trained for decades to believe smaller is better. “If I’m reminded that my bum and thighs are bigger, I’m like ‘woo, go me’, because that’s three years of consistent effort,” says Alice. For me, there’s still some cognitive, as well as physical, heavy lifting needed but the work feels worth doing. Cultivating a more compassionate attitude towards my body feels as valuable on the cusp of my 50s as forging muscle or stronger bones.

That’s if I keep it up. Will I? Well, my six-week trial gym membership is over, but while writing this, I left my desk on a deadline, cycled there, paid £8 and spent 45 minutes lifting. I even used the “scary side” solo for the first time, setting up my own barbell plates and (admittedly accidentally – I miscalculated my weights) deadlifting a new PB of 30kg. I think I’m a lady who LHS now.