If you thought lifting weights was only for muscle-bound men, think again. Victoria Beckham’s strong and lean body is all over her Instagram account. 

And she’s not doing Pilates or yoga — but squatting with hefty barbells.

Once a self-confessed cardio queen, Beckham “has transformed her body, 

building up her weights very quietly over the last five years,” her trainer Bobby Rich says. “She’s a machine.”

She’s not alone. Weights rooms are now full of women in designer leggings boasting about how much they can lift. 

Apparently the supermodel Kate Upton can do an impressive 90kg (or 200lb) hip thrust and 225kg sled push, 

Emily Blunt works out in a weighted vest and Emma Stone lifts 30kg dumbbells during “weighted carries”.

Beckham’s curiosity for the weights rack was a piqued while watching her husband, David, working out. “She started asking a few questions, then I said, ‘Let’s just try a session,’” Rich says. “It really suits her right now at this new stage of life, when she wants to focus on being strong and future-proof her body.”

The celebrity trainer David Higgins, who works with clients ranging from Scarlett Johansson to Felicity Jones, says the women he trains “love weights sessions because they feel empowered. Adding in heavy weights can totally transform your body. You’re not going to bulk up if you keep it varied.” (body-space.co.uk).

Rachael Sacerdoti, a health and fitness coach to high-net-worth female clients ranging from CEOs to royalty, (itssosimple.co.uk), says that the perception around weights has changed. “Women used to be so scared of getting bulky because they saw male bodybuilders, but that’s just not how women’s bodies work.”

She started transforming her own body using weights at the age of 39, having had three children, and lost 30kg. Now 45, she has kept it off, and built more muscle. “I had tried every diet, followed every trend, but it was lifting weights that truly revolutionised my body,” she says. She lifts four or five times a week, increase the load as her body adapts to the new weight.

Dr Gabrielle Lyon, a functional medical doctor and author of Forever Strong, believes that building muscle is the key to tackling the middle-age spread. “Our muscle health declines naturally as we get older — from about our thirties in a process known as sarcopenia,” she says. “As muscle in our body becomes less responsive to protein and starts to decline, it often gets replaced by fat. This compounds over time. By the age of 50 muscle mass decreases at an annual rate of 1 to 2 per cent.”

The good news, she says, is that we can reverse that, at any age. “The earlier you start focusing on muscle, the better, but you can do this in your fifties or sixties. Even if you’re in your eighties, there’s still lots to gain.”

Building muscle also benefits other parts of the body, says Dr Sabine Donnai, founder of the Viavi health clinic on Harley Street (viavi.com). “Increasing our muscle increases insulin receptors, which results in reducing insulin resistance. This leads to reduced cellular inflammation, which supports reduction in chronic disease.”

It also decreases the risk of cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease, she adds, while helping to prevent a wide range of age-related diseases. How? “It increases the amount of growth factor for the brain, which increases the proliferation of neurons within the hippocampus in the brain, which in turn improves cognitive performance.”

A systematic review by Chinese researchers looking into ageing found that resistance training had positive effects on the executive function and cognitive function in the elderly, while a 2023 Brazilian study found that midlife men completing strength exercises at 80 per cent of their maximum output for four sets, with a two-minute rest period in between, “significantly enhance” levels of growth factors integral for neuronal development.

Strength training can also help to change attitudes towards exercise. The American writer Casey Johnston, author of the Substack newsletter She’s a Beast and the advice column Ask a Swole Woman, started lifting ten years ago, after years of running excessively and eating “as little as possible” to try to stay thin. She can now deadlift 140kg. “As a woman I’d been taught to think of all of this stuff — eating, exercise and resting — as shame and guilt-oriented and only to be used for essentially destructive purposes,” she says. “But [if you’re] lifting, resting and recovering — through eating, sleeping and not doing too much — is virtually as important as the training itself, because that’s when muscle is really built.” It has been, she says, “really important counterprogramming to the way I’d been taught to think before.”

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Source: USA Today