Do You Really Have to Lift Heavy for Your Bones?

I want to start with a confession, because it shapes everything that follows. Heavy lifting does not suit me. I have tried it more than once, properly and with good coaching, and every time I come away exhausted, achey and stiff for days afterwards. My nervous system does not thank me for it and neither do my joints. For a while that left me feeling like I was doing menopause wrong, because the message coming at me from every direction was simple and loud: lift heavy or your bones are doomed.

So I went looking at where that message came from and what the more recent research actually says. The science turns out to be more nuanced, and more reassuring, than the headlines suggest. Here is what I found. But first let's define strength.

What does Strength Mean?

Strength does not come from repeating the same thing over and over at the same effort. The body adapts to whatever you ask of it, so once a movement starts to feel easy it stops being a challenge and nothing has much reason to change. To keep getting stronger you have to keep raising the demand, whether that means more weight, more repetitions, a greater range of movement or a harder variation. Bone follows the same principle. Wolff's law describes how bone remodels in response to the mechanical stress placed on it, building more density in the places that are loaded repeatedly and progressively, while Davis's law extends the same idea to the soft tissues, the muscles, tendons and fascia that adapt to the demands we put through them. The load can come from a kettlebell, a dumbbell or your own bodyweight worked through a challenging range, so what matters is that the demand is real and that it keeps rising over time rather than staying still.

Where the "lift heavy" message began

The origin point is a study called LIFTMOR, published in 2018 in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research by Watson, Weeks, Beck and colleagues in Australia. It took postmenopausal women with low bone mass and put them through twice-weekly high-intensity resistance and impact training. We are talking deadlifts, back squats and overhead presses at more than 85 percent of their one-rep maximum, alongside jumping movements.

The results were genuinely important. The women improved bone density at the spine and hip, and the training proved safe, with only one minor adverse event across the trial. This mattered enormously, because for decades women with thinning bones had been told to avoid exactly this kind of loading in case they hurt themselves. LIFTMOR challenged that caution and showed that brief, well-coached heavy training could be both safe and effective.

That is the study sitting underneath almost every "you must lift heavy" reel you have ever scrolled past.

How the message hardened

The same research group followed up with a two-part review and meta-analysis in 2021, published in the journal Bone. Their conclusions reinforced the picture in three ways:

1. Low-intensity exercise, the gentle end of the spectrum, was largely ineffective as a stimulus for building bone.
2. Moderate to high intensity work was more beneficial for bone mass.
3. Combining resistance training with impact, the jumping and hopping element, appeared to be the most effective approach of all.

Taken together, this is where the culture tipped into "heavy or nothing." If low intensity does very little, the logic went, then only the hardest training is worth doing.

Where the picture is being reassessed

More recent research has started to complicate that neat story, mostly because newer studies compare many different training protocols against each other rather than simply testing heavy loading against doing nothing at all.

A network meta-analysis published in 2023 in Frontiers in Physiology ranked a range of resistance training approaches and found that moderate-intensity training performed three days a week came out on top for improving bone density at the spine, femoral neck, hip and trochanter. In their analysis, that moderate three-times-weekly approach actually outperformed both the lighter and the heavier options. Their practical takeaway was that moderate intensity, done consistently three times a week, can be a sensible clinical choice for postmenopausal women.

A further meta-analysis published in 2025 in the Journal of Orthopaedic Surgery and Research, covering trials up to March of that year, kept resistance training firmly in the frame as beneficial, and noted something that any honest teacher recognises: adherence was higher when the training was supervised, flexible and socially supportive, rather than gruelling and isolating. In other words, the training people can actually sustain tends to be the training that works, because bone responds to what you keep doing, not to what you attempt once and abandon.

Spine or hip?

Even in the research that most strongly favours heavy lifting, the benefit was clearest in the lower spine ie the lumbar vertebrae. When it came to the hip, the picture was less impressive.

In some of the research that most favours heavy lifting, high intensity training improved bone density reliably at the spine but showed no significant advantage at the femoral neck, ie the narrow part of the hip below the ball of the joint. This is the very site where a fracture tends to occur often, so even the strongest case for lifting heavy turns out to be specific to certain parts of the skeleton rather than a blanket win everywhere, which is all the more reason to load the body in a variety of ways rather than pinning everything on one method.

What I take from all of this

Staying as fair to the evidence as I can, three things stand out:

1. Loading genuinely matters. Very gentle movement with tiny weights does not appear to build bone, so none of this is permission to avoid effort altogether.
2. The idea that only maximal, near-one-rep-max barbell work counts has softened considerably. The more recent comparative research suggests consistent, progressive, moderately challenging loading can serve many women very well.
3. Frequency, progression and staying with it over time are doing a great deal of the work that the early headlines credited to sheer heaviness.

The best training for your bones is not the most extreme thing you can force yourself through, it is the challenging-but-sustainable thing you will still be doing in three years.

My own approach

I have built something I can actually keep up. I alternate my days. One day I do a bodyweight and kettle bell or dumb bell workout, which loads my body properly through my own weight, presses, pulls, squats and holds. I often finish with my favourite practices- pranayama and shavasana. The next day I focus on asana, and finding some of the deeper backbends or movements that I don't find in strength work.

Som days its just pranayama or restorative yoga or somatics. Any movement genuinely does beat none, and the research increasingly agrees.

If heavy lifting lights you up and your body loves it, wonderful, keep going. But if it leaves you exhausted and defeated the way it does me, you have not failed at anything. You simply have permission, backed by the evidence, to find the approach that suits you. The key is finding something you will actually do and that two or three times a week keeps or increases strength to keep those bones strong, and for the essential mental health component too.

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References

• LIFTMOR (Watson, Weeks, Beck et al., 2018) with its DOI.
• Kistler-Fischbacher part 1 systematic review (Bone, 2021).
• Kistler-Fischbacher part 2 meta-analysis (Bone, 2021).
• The Wang et al. network meta-analysis (Frontiers in Physiology, 2023).
• The Zhao et al. optimal-parameters meta-analysis (Journal of Orthopaedic Surgery and Research, 2025).
• The reassessment towards moderate intensity comes primarily from Wang et al. 2023, the site-specific limits of heavy lifting come from Kistler-Fischbacher et al. 2021, and Zhao et al. 2025 adds the adherence and sustainability angle.