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It’s actually even worse than it sounds.
This is a solved problem. Resistance training is incredibly effective at not just preventing but totally reversing bone loss in women. That is on top of about a hundred thousand other proven benefits of training. Literally 30 minutes a week at planet fitness with a halfway decent plan can gift you 30+ quality adjusted life years.
But how do we treat this proven, accessible, miraculous cure to this life threatening problem that every woman faces? Well, we endure extreme societal pressure to avoid lifting weights at all costs of course! Wouldn’t want to accidentally become too manly!
Literally everyone should be sickened by this state of affairs
Well, we endure extreme societal pressure to avoid lifting weights
Is this actually true? Like half the women I know lift and gymfluencers is a huge thing
It sounds like you’ve cultivated a very gym positive space, and that’s great! But yes it far more common still for women to be repulsed by the idea of lifting weights, often because of fears of “becoming too big” or “looking like a man”
Acceptance of lifting is absolutely growing among women, as it should be, but there’s a lot of work left to do!
Will be even more fun when the ozempic / wegovy / semaglutude users start falling apart.
It’s a serious concern. To properly lose weight with the support of these drugs you need resistance training and to eat right
Do we have any actual evidence of this, or is this just Faustian speculation?
Whenever there is as new, truly revolutionary medical treatment, there is always a mountain of fear mongering around it. People just don’t want to accept that we actually can make real progress. Hell, any time there is any new treatment discusses, the top posts are always people saying that only the rich will ever be able to afford it. Of course, every treatment starts that way, and countless treatments that were once only for the rich can now be enjoyed by everyone.
I think it’s a logical error that people make, simply because they are wary of scams. It’s generally healthy to be skeptical of miraculous promises. But that goes too far when people replace “we should treat this skeptically” with “there simply must be some horrible cost to this revolutionary good thing. I will assume there is one, even if there is no evidence for it. Anything that good has to be a deal with the Devil carrying some horrible cost.”
Funny enough, Cory Doctorow covered something similar in his book Makers. There was a therapy (I forget, either injection or gene therapy) that led to obese people being able to eat whatever they want and still get thin. They ended up essentially skeletal and brittle in the end over years, turned out it’s very bad for you and they ended up needed to eat like 10k calories a day to survive.
I hate to tell you, but this sort of anti-science medical fearmongering is half the reason why millennials and older had to suffer through their entire formative years and young adult lives dealing with untreated ADHD by treating help as if it’s makes people lesser than others.
They’re just kids! They don’t need no ritalin, that’s just how boys are! He just needs to focus, and that’s on the school to figure out! Besides, what happens when they stop taking it, all the good work you’ve done for 10 years including the capability of getting a good job will just fall apart when the apocalypse hits!
Okay, Bill. Now don’t forget to take your omeprazole and losartan heart meds before you have to visit the ER again from thinking you’re having a heart attack, or actually having one again.
I’ve never heard of a guy not wanting their girl to do strength training, that just makes the girl hotter…
Maybe that’s like an old person thing? Like gen x and older?
Not sure it’s a generation thing. For example, Gen X grew up with ladies workout videos, thigh master, the little white guy with the Afro, etc. Could this be a reaction to the body positivity movement?
I gotta say though, there are a ton of women lifting at the gyms I’ve gone to
Same with mine! There’s been a lot of outreach and acceptance and many women have discovered that training can be a joy. I think much credit can also be granted to the sport of women’s powerlifting, which is growing rapidly
This is a solved problem.
That’s a really goddamn bold claim that you don’t bother to back up. Here’s a 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis exploring our current understanding of how resistance training improves bone mineral density in postmenopausal women.
Here’s their conclusion:
Resistance training can beneficially influence BMD [bone mineral density] in postmenopausal women, particularly at the LS [lumbar spine], FN [femoral neck], and TH [total hip]. A high-intensity training regimen (≥ 70% 1RM [1-rep max]) performed three times per week with a longer training duration may be optimal. However, significant heterogeneity among the included studies for LS and FN bone density may affect the accuracy of the pooled results, thereby limiting the generalizability of these findings. More high-quality clinical trials are needed to confirm these findings.
So it’s good. Nobody would deny that it’s good. The problem is when you start throwing around terms like “solved” and “miraculous cure” to complex medical problems without anything to back it up – especially in an era of rampant medical disinformation.
I think the previous comment was rather hyperbolic, but to a degree it’s true. I wouldn’t call it solved, obviously, since removing all other factors, women experience more osteoporosis and overall bone loss than men in general. Though when we consider activity, it’s more common for men to be physically active in general, and higher overall muscle mass means greater bone density in the longer term, to my understanding.
But also, most of western society is extremely sedentary, and there is a certain inertia when it comes to encouraging physical fitness as a solution. People do tend to want a magic pill for things. Just look at all the fervor over Ozempic.
Thank you for actually engaging with the post instead of devolving into a holier-than-thou wanna-be-lawyer analysis that is selectively deaf to existence of hyperbole!
I would say that we can’t ignore the historical or biological context of why women experience more osteoporosis. Menopause obviously, but also the pressure to avoid training.
Given the biological context, and the proven effectiveness of training, the only honest conclusion is that training is more important for women than men. Yet it’s still far more common for women to be pushed away from the gym, due to it widely being considered masculine. Hopefully we can all work together to rectify this serious issue
I wonder how it looks for women who started before menopause though rather than after.
One data point only. My mom and grandma had osteoporosis, and I had restrictive eating as a teen so didn’t build enough bones. I do work out heavier than my mom did (lift occasionally but also yoga with pushups & arm balancing, etc. More focus on muscle) because of starting at a disadvantage and also, importantly, do MHT. At mid-50s I did manage to immaterially INCREASE my bone mass, so a little better than maintaining, rather than the steep loss that would be expected at menopause.
There is more than one factor, right? I encouraged my daughters to eat more and do more exercise when they were teenagers so they will start out with heavier bones than I did, if you start with more you can lose some and still be ok.
But plenty of people have osteoporosis as an endocrine issue, the chemistry of their blood is taking more bone than it’s building. I don’t think that’s something that you can necessarily lift your way out of.
Incredibly disingenuous of you to phrase it as “unable to deny that it’s good” while posting irrelevant snippets from studies. Yes, research is still ongoing on how much resistance training is needed to reap the full benefits. Research of this type will always be ongoing.
Meanwhile, the consensus of all medical experts is that women should be training because it has the power to reverse the course of this debilitating illness, among about a hundred thousand other significant benefits. We’re not at the “looking into it” stage, we’re at “the mayo clinic officially recommends training” stage.
Everyone with an idea of how debilitating illnesses usually play out will have correctly identified this as a being a miracle. You, like me, should be rejoicing in this fact and going out into the streets to yell this news at everyone who will listen.
It is such a sadness that women have for so long been robbed of their opportunity to partake in training due to stigma
Instead of just critiquing, how about you actually try to back up your claim that resistance training significantly improves bone density or prevents bone loss in women? As you haven’t provided any sources, it sounds like you’re just repeating gym bro anecdotal knowledge. You’re the one making that claim.
You want a source for the consensus of all credible medical experts? Sure, you can start with the link the other user posted which 100% confirms the claim and also has its own enormous list of sources.
You could then type “resistance training osteoporosis mayo clinic” into your favorite search bar to see why they so strongly advise resistance training for women with the condition.
You could then try doing the same with literally any and every institution.
There’s a reason it devolved into “unable to say that it’s not good”. It is simply an established fact that training increases your bone density. This is obviously a godsend for those of us predisposed to reduced bone density as we age.
And for the record, I 100% stand with whatever gym bros you are referring to who are begging older ladies to come train with them so they can maintain their quality of life and independence as they age. Did you intend that as an insult? You make them sound like the chillest, nicest people on earth lol
There’s plenty of studies on the effects of resistance training on Osteosarcopenia and Osteoporosis. You’re being a little ridiculous here. It’s a simple google search away.
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6279907/
- https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/strength-training-builds-more-than-muscles
- https://www.orthopt.org/blog/the-role-of-strength-training-in-preventing-osteoporosis-functional-exercises-and-evidence-based-benefits
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25772806/
- https://theros.org.uk/information-and-support/bone-health/exercise-for-bones/
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9927006/
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I mean, let’s be honest, it would have to be rich white men losing 20%, then we would find a cure, and price it so that anyone else couldn’t afford it, even if it cost like $12 to make
They won’t cure something that they can profit from by making something a subscription.
~Baldness. Erectile Dysfunction. Incontinence.~
The anti vaxx movement was a conspiracy by big pharma to get people to stop taking the cheapest way to prevent disease, so that they can profit on the expensive ways to treat those easily preventable diseases.
Same principal that IT works off of now. Hey, get rid of the email client you’ve been comfortably using for years, and instead buy this jankier version that you need to pay a subscription for…
Ah. The insulin racket
* US insulin racket. Be specific.
They do. Men lose bone density as well, just at a slower rate. It’s at about 20% when men are 60 instead of 50.
You are a cigarette op
Aging should be studied a lot more. I believe once the AI bubble pops, the computing power and models should be applied to biology. How do ageless atoms become old meat? I want to know, as an old meat myself, and if we can treat, stop, or even reverse the process.
AI is going to be applied to biology.
They’ll develop all sorts of bioweapons. They’ve all ready made huge strides in parasymoethetic nerve agents.
How do ageless atoms become old meat? I want to know, as an old meat myself, and if we can treat, stop, or even reverse the process.
Atoms must arrange themselves in a particular way to become a cell. A cell knows how to make copies of itself, but sometimes mistakes can happen. Like a game of telephone, the cell at the end of the line only knows how to make a copy of itself, not how to make a copy of the original cell it came from. The mistakes gradually accumulate over time, which causes improperly formed cells to accumulate over time and give the appearance of “aging”.
In theory, aging is a condition that is surmountable. There are jellyfish that are swimming in the ocean right now that are functionally immortal. They create perfect copies of their DNA every single time, and can repair damage to cells without leaving a trace of the original injury. If we could figure out the processes that allow them to do this, it could be applied to the human genome as well.
And yet everyone seems to age the same. Funny how those “mistakes” never turn me into a whale or a plant, I surmise it’s a bit more complex than that.
Of course it’s more complex than my overly simplistic explanation, but I don’t want to bore you with details when you could achieve the same result by cracking open a biology textbook. I wouldn’t really wish that on anybody right now, honestly. Not how I would want to kick off twenty-twenty-six.
To circle around back to the main point, I agree with you wholeheartedly. Aging should be studied more. There are breakthroughs in medicine just waiting to be discovered that could not just extend our lives, but also extend the portions of our lives where we are healthy and fit enough to enjoy doing things, rather than wasting away in nursing homes and hospice beds.
That’s…not how it works. If I kept copying a car, using the previous one as a stencil, I’d eventually end up with something that mostly resembles a car but ultimately doesn’t work properly. Eventually, it would fail to function at all but at a glance it would look more or less the same. At no point would it ever resemble a motorcycle and by the time such a mistake would happen I would have stopped even trying long before that or, to go back to cells, the body would have died because too many things weren’t working correctly to live long enough to turn into a different animal entirely.
I think that’s accounted for under mutations and cancer and such. You theoretically could mutate into a whale but the probability of your cells making specific enough mistakes for that to happen is so astronomically small that it’s essentially zero.
Part of the problem is telomerase being lost. The downside is that it’s a cancer prevention mechanism, so messing with it (by adding more) is bad news.
AI/ML has already been used to study protein folding and I’m sure it’ll be used to study other facets of biology too. There’s great use cases for the tech once you look past the tell-mentally-ill-people-to-kill-their-families-bots.
I may be wrong but I think one hard part is identifying the places where ML makes sense to use. Need people who understand biology AND ML for that.
Exactly. AI/ML absolutely has useful use cases, it’s just not a complete solution for literally anything.
Most of the stuff known as AI in the current environment is really, really powerful inference engines. And understanding the limits of inference (see for example Hume’s Problem of Induction) is an important part of understanding the appropriate scope of where these tools are actually useful and where they’re actively misleading or dangerous.
So, take the example of filling in unknown details in a low resolution image. We might be able to double the number of pixels and try to fill in our best guesses of what belongs in the in-between pixels that weren’t in the original image. That’s probably a pretty good use of inference.
But guessing what’s off the edge of the picture is built on a less stable and predictable process, less grounded in what is probably true.
When we use these technologies, we need domain-specific expertise to be able to define which problems are the interstitial type where inferential engines are good at filling things in, and which are trying to venture beyond the frontier of what is known/proven and susceptible to “hallucination.”
That’s why there’s likely going to be a combination of things that are improved and worsened by the explosion of AI capabilities, and it’ll be up to us to know which is which.
There’s a number of different reasons but the hardest to overcome is the fact that we evolved to grow old and die. Having an upper limit on our reproductive age positively benefits our ability to keep evolving and having an upper limit on total age balances the benefits of age (wisdom and experience) with the need to not deny the younger generations of resources.
This is such gender war dog shit.
The elite and society at large doesn’t care about anyone in the lower classes, man or women, young or old.
Pointing out gender-related issues is not a “gender war”. Discussing someone else’s issues is not an attack on you.
Putting the gender-related issues into a meme with a “if this affected men then there would be more funding” doesn’t feel like discussing issues and more like “gender war”.
Leftists who view everything as a class issue get their asses handed to them at the polls every time. Yes, you can come up with some complicated strained logic for why things like homophobia or racism are a class issue, but that just doesn’t jive with what people experience in their actual lives. And you can stamp your feet and say that class issues are the most important issue, and everything else is secondary. Meanwhile, targeted minority groups will ignore you and focus on their actual real most important issues.
Mindlessly criticising something and making it about your own pet “war”
Ok to your second sentence, but it is proven over and over again that health care for women is at a much lower standard than for men. Less funding, less research, less care. Those are objective facts. Calling that out is not creating a gender war its identifying a drastic gap that has been written about in countless medical journals for decades.
are we really calling awareness of gender issues gender war? how do you expect gender issues to be resolved if no one’s allowed to talk about them?
turns out there’s some pretty major issues with the gender binary, but I’m not sure how you expect to fix that without talking about it. it’s fair to say capatilism is part of the root cause but reducing it to solely that is a little disingenuous.
The wealthy and powerful see the bodies of the working class the same way they see the natural resources of the planet. When all your value has been extracted, your husk will be cast aside or used as a means to extract wealth or value from someone else.
? There are treatments for osteoporosis. They’re called bisphosphonates. And bone density screenings are routine in older women. Am I missing something?
You’re just not hating on men the right way.
To be fair this is more industry specific than just motivated by some sense of misandry.
It’s specifically doctors. And medicine is still biased as fuck.
Rich men would invest in their own bones, the rest of us would die even earlier than women do.
