How much strength training do you actually need?

I got the same question three times last month, from three very different women.

"Am I doing enough?"

The first one lifts twice a week and feels guilty that it isn't four. The second is already doing four and wants to know whether she ought to be doing six. The third hasn't started at all, because everything she reads makes strength training sound like a part-time job, and she doesn't have a part-time job's worth of hours lying around.

They were all asking me the same thing, and none of it was really about sets and reps. What they wanted to know was when they'd finally get to stop feeling like they were failing at this.

For a long time, the most honest answer I had was "probably a bit more than you're doing now," which is a genuinely unhelpful thing to say to a busy woman. 

Now we finally have a real number. It's smaller than you'd guess, and the part that surprised me is that it comes with a ceiling.

A 2026 paper in the British Journal of Sports Medicine pooled 30 years of data from three enormous cohorts and followed 147,374 people. Of those participants, 115,834 were women with an average age of 54 when they enrolled. They were nurses and health professionals who got checked in on every two years for up to three decades, which is about as close as research like this gets to watching lives unfold in real time.

So for once, when I tell you what the data says about strength training and living longer, I'm not quietly translating results from a room full of 22-year-old men.

The strength training sweet spot

The lowest mortality rates showed up in the people doing 90 to 120 minutes of strength training a week.

That's two 45-minute sessions per week, or three or four 30-minute ones. I’d say this is a pretty manageable schedule, even during a busy week.

At that amount, participants had a 13% lower risk of dying from any cause, a 19% lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, and a 27% lower risk of dying from neurological disease, the category that includes Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

And here’s what’s even more surprising: when people went above 120 minutes a week, the benefit simply stopped climbing. More was not better. More was just more.

There it is, the finish line I could never hand anybody before. It exists, it fits on a calendar, and you can cross it on a Tuesday, a Saturday, or any day in between.

Cardio: the part you shouldn't skip

Cardio still did the heaviest lifting in this data.

Strength training on its own was linked to roughly 7 to 11% lower mortality risk, while aerobic exercise on its own was linked to a 26 to 43% drop. The lowest risk of all belonged to the people doing both, where the reductions climbed past 45%.

Translation? This is not permission to abandon your walks in favor of the squat rack. It is permission to stop believing that you need five gym days to actually get longevity results. Strength training is what you add on top of the walking, and you can get meaningful benefits without rearranging your life around the gym.

One finding we can’t quite explain

There was one genuinely odd finding in here, and I'd rather hand it to you than pretend the data came out cleaner than it did. 

For cancer deaths specifically, the strength training benefit turned up only at the low end, somewhere around 1 to 60 minutes a week, and not at the higher amounts. Nobody has a tidy explanation for that yet. It's also worth remembering that this kind of study follows people and looks for patterns, so it can show us a relationship without proving cause and effect.

How to HOP to it

Count what you’re already doing.

This study counted body weight work, which means your push-ups, squats, and lunges all belong in the total. You don't need a barbell or a gym membership to get into the 90-minute club.

Pick two days and defend them.

Two 45-minute sessions gets you the whole benefit. Put them on the calendar the way you'd add a doctor's appointment, and let the rest of the week negotiate around them.

Keep the walking.

The combination of strength training and aerobic exercise beat either one on its own every single time. Keep aiming for 7,500 to 10,000 steps on most days.

The bottom line

Here’s the goal: roughly two hours a week of strength training, on top of the walking or biking or rowing you're already doing most days.

That's the whole prescription, and it's a dose almost every woman reading this can actually hit.

Now, HOP to it!

Dr. Amy Killen & the HOP Team

P.S. 115,834 women, average age 54. The next time somebody tells you the strength training research is all young men in a college gym, you have a receipt.