The Strength Training Myths Trainers Are Still Telling Female Members

This just in: Women don’t need to strength train differently.

A brand new meta-analysis synthesizes the most comprehensive look at how women respond to resistance training across their entire lifespan and the findings should reshape how fitness operators program, coach and communicate with their female members.

Episode 14 breaks down the paper which reviewed 126 studies involving more than 4,000 women ranging from premenopausal to postmenopausal, with a mean age of 50. Several of the conclusions directly challenge common myths still being repeated on gym floors today.

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Club Solutions Magazine · New Research Shatters the Strength Training Myths Trainers Are Still Telling Female Members

What This Episode Covers

This episode unpacks the review in The Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport and what it means for fitness professionals working with female members at every age.

Key discussion points include:

Why women have significantly underrepresented fin exercise science research for decades and why this paper represents a meaningful shift.
The finding that females achieve similar lower body strength and hypertrophy gain as males, and actually show greater relative upper body strength increases.
Why no age-related differences in adaptive capacity were found — meaning women at 50, 70 and 80 respond to resistance training to the same degree.
The finding that training two times per week produced comparable results to three or four times per week.
Why current resistant training recommendations appear to apply equally to both men and women and what that means for marketing.

Why This Matter for Operators

This paper is a direct challenge to some of the longest-standing ideas in fitness and an opportunity for clubs to lead with the science. Older women remain underrepresented on the floor and personal trainers telling postmenopausal women they need to train differently are contradicting what the research now shows. Women, especially over the age of 50, are a reachable audience and can achieve meaningful results at any age.

Key implications for operators include:

Auditing the coaching language used with female members to ensure it reflects current evidence.
Leveraging the study’s findings in marketing and member communications.
Examining how strength training spaces and programming are positioned for women.
Empowering personal trainers with updated education that removes the sex-based differentiation not supported by the research, while still encouraging individualized programming based on personal history, preference and goals.

The women who have the most to gain from resistance training are often the ones least likely to be doing it. This paper gives operators both the evidence and the mandate to change that.