Women lift weights to fight midlife aging crises

ATLANTA — Mary Huber's wavy brown hair gently frames her face, contorted into a grimace now.

Trainer Luis Boscan is chiding her for too much talking and not enough lifting.

"Mary, get to work!" Boscan yells, adding, with a laugh, "You'll never have muscles like me if you do all that talking!"

Huber knows she'll never have muscles like Boscan, whose biceps are about the size of a small redwood. But the 55-year-old woman does hope to keep her bones healthy, increase her physical stamina and keep her body fat low.

Like thousands of other women who grew up thinking that girls don't lift weights, Huber has been regularly training with weights. She trains twice a week with Boscan as well as working out on her own.

"I started doing it because I wanted to get stronger," says Huber, an Atlanta laywer who has been lifting weights about eight years. "I was getting tired during trials and finding that I couldn't make it through a long trial. I was losing stamina."

Huber is far from alone. Strength training for women is the biggest growth segment of the fitness industry, Dr. Miriam Nelson says. Nelson is director of the John Hancock Center for Physical Activity and Nutrition at Tufts University and author of several pioneering studies that showed the benefits of weight training in women.

By some estimates, as many as 25 million women are doing some form of strength training, although Nelson says she thinks that number could be a little exaggerated.

The anecdotal evidence is compelling. Elite athletes such as golfer Annika Sorenstam have added hours of weight training to their workouts. Washington power brokers work out together, and gyms throughout the country have added group weight-lifting classes and strength classes such as Pilates.

Those who coach elite, well-conditioned athletes are encouraging, if not insisting that their players work regularly with weights to improve stamina and help prevent injury.

"What we see with a lot of our athletes is that they want to improve their power production, how fast they can move," says Chris Hirth, a trainer for the University of North Carolina. "As they get larger muscles, they gain power, which helps them strike a ball fast, run faster. It also helps with injury prevention."

Strength training, important for athletic competition, might be even more so for daily living, Nelson and others say.

—Slowing muscle loss

Women and men alike begin to lose muscle in their late 30s. During their 40s, the loss can be about one-quarter of a pound a year, sometimes more. Over 10 years, a person easily can lose two and a half pounds of muscle.

That's one thing for men but something altogether different for women, who usually do not have as much muscle.

Such muscle loss is a major factor in osteoporosis, Nelson and others say, because bones weaken as they are asked to carry less and less weight. The muscle loss also contributes to falls in old age, a leading cause of accidental death in people 65 and older. And it depletes a woman's energy and ability to enjoy routine activities.

Strength training, on the other hand, actually helps a women get a more youthful body, Nelson says. It restores muscle mass lost to the natural aging process.

Nelson's studies have shown that weightlifting not only relieves symptoms of osteoporosis and arthritis but also helps symptoms of sleep disturbances, Type II diabetes and depression.

Strength training, which usually consists of weightlifting but also incorporates core body training, works because new muscle tissue is produced when muscle cells are required to lift something heavy on a repetitive basis.

The load, or the amount of weight lifted, signals muscle cells to produce more protein. It can't happen just from consuming more protein, Nelson says.

The extra weight from the load also causes subtle neurological changes in the muscle tissue, she says, and helps the fiber become more synchronized.

It is those subtle, cellular changes that lead to better balance and strength over a period of time, sometimes months.

—You can't 'look like a man'

We're not talking beefcake, nor hours of extra work in a gym. Women can add extra muscle mass by exercising at least six main muscle groups, two to three times a week, Nelson says. After initial instruction on proper usage and form, a person can lift weights at home. Many people, as Huber does, prefer to work with a trainer for motivation, and some work out in group classes.

Women need not fear that they will bulk up like a man.

"I used to hear them say, 'Oh, I don't want to look like a man,' " trainer Boscan says. "And I tell them they cannot."

That's because women do not produce as much testosterone, which contributes to muscle growth, as men.

The bad news is that such training adds one more thing for already-harried people to do to try to stay healthy. Experts recommend weight training in addition to regular, aerobic exercise.

Elizabeth David, an exercise physiologist with the Cooper Aerobic Center and also a wellness director for Chick-fil-A, says she coaches people to start small, doing a few push-ups or stretches before going to bed, and learning exercises to do with resistance bands.

"You can do those on the road even, when you're watching the news," David says.

Strength training is one activity, however, in whch the strain really is worth the gain for women, Nelson says. "It has so many benefits," she says. "Becoming physically strong as a woman is incredibly empowering."

Virginia Anderson writes for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.