Holly Rilinger wants you to lift heavy

Is it time to ditch your 5 and 10 pound weights and trade them in for heavy ones? Holly Rilinger says yes. And after training with her for 3 months and increasing my bone density, so do I.

Holly Rilinger with her heavy weights. ©Kim Miller

“A lot of times we, as women, underestimate our strength. Guys, for whatever reason, don’t have that problem. They overestimate.”

-Holly Rilinger, at the beginning of an online group class I recently took with her

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As some of you know, last year, I was diagnosed with osteoporosis. Ever since, I have been looking for concrete, evidence-based, medically-sound ways to counterbalance the ever expanding holes in my bones. One way, I was told—aside from the HRT I was already taking—would be to focus on strength training three times a week. Minimum.

“Seriously? Three times a week?” I said to my doctor, thinking, ugh, no, please, weights, boring, yuck! I’ll never be motivated enough to keep that up one day a week, let alone three. The only time I’ve ever lifted weights in my life was purely for vanity reasons, before my 1993 wedding. And only my biceps, triceps, and shoulders back then, in the hopes of having my arms look good in my sleeveless dress. Look, I’m not proud of this, but there you have it. And, given that marriage’s long and painful demise, perhaps I should have focused more on building strength in our relationship than in my biceps. “But I’m already doing yoga and walking!” I said. “Isn’t that enough?”

No, I was told. At my age, 58, and with my crumbling bones, I needed to be lifting heavy weights, and I needed to lift them consistently enough, several times each week with recovery days in between—until death do us part, but for real this time—that I could keep building muscle and perhaps even bone mass, too. With the emphasis on the word perhaps.

As with most things women’s health-related, we actually don’t have enough properly conducted studies on post-menopausal women lifting weights to prove that building bone mass (BMD, aka “bone mineral density) is possible after menopause. This was, sadly, as true in this 2003 article as it is today:

“Recent meta-analyses have reported retention or gains in BMD at the femoral neck and at the lumbar spine associated with weight-training exercise in postmenopausal women. However, evidence has not been consistent because studies were small or poorly designed and utilized a variety of intervention types, leading the authors of several meta-analyses, as well as the expert panel of the American College of Sports Medicine, to call for well-designed research to define more precisely the type and amount of exercise needed to stimulate bone formation.”

Have those well-designed research studies been undertaken since? I did a lot of digging, and I couldn’t find much beyond this 2018 study of 101 women, showing that high-impact training is better on bones than low-impact training, with some women ever-so-slightly increasing bone density in the femoral neck by 0.3% ± 2.6% with high impact exercises versus losing density in that same area with low impact exercise. Even the Osteoporosis Foundation claims weight lifting will only increase bone mass by a paltry 1-2%, if that.

Happy elders dancing on the Osteoporosis Foundation’s website

So, wait. Hold up. Now I had to decide: would the effort of lifting three times a week be worth it? Would my bones even improve at my age? Hard to say. I was leaning toward sticking with my normal yoga + walking routine, maybe taking some osteoporosis drugs, and hoping to stay upright and not fall. I would avoid ice! Slippery floors! How hard could it be?

But after I’d completed a deep dive into the various pharmaceutical interventions for osteoporosis for my recent article in The Guardian, I wasn’t convinced—at all—that I wanted to ingest or be infused with any of them before giving weight lifting a chance. Could I actually build bone mass with free weights alone? It seemed worth finding out.

I would be, I told myself, an osteoporotic experiment of one. A statistically insignificant anomaly if lifting weights worked, but personally? A triumph. I decided I would start a consistent weight-lifting program, and then I would get a new DEXA scan in the exact same radiology lab I got my first one, on the exact same machine, just to see if there’d been improvement in bone mass or, at the very least, no more deterioration or loss of bone mass.

In other words, holding steady was my goal. Anything else would be gravy.

Okay, great, I thought. I have my plan in place. But where to even begin? I don’t have the budget for a personal trainer. I don’t even belong to a gym, even if I could afford a trainer, and there’s not one within close walking distance or commuting distance within my neighborhood—I live in a part of Brooklyn that was cut off from both public transportation and the rest of the borough by that evil genius Robert Moses—so the first thing I needed to do was buy some weights. And also a kettle bell. And to clear some space at the foot of my bed as my workout area. All of which I did. Now what?

I googled “weight training for women.” I searched for weight training influencers on social media. One advised only lifting light weights and increasing repetitions so you don’t “bulk up.” Others seemed far more invested in how hot they looked in their workout clothes than in any evidence-based methods for others—they were all about outward aesthetics, not inward bone building. “Snatch that waist! Lift that butt!” Um, I’ve had three children. And tons of therapy. I’m fine with loose skin around my belly and a dimpled ass. The former is my trophy for growing babies inside my body. The latter is my genetic inheritance.

One online lifting routine put my body through a workout that threw out my back for two weeks because they did not demonstrate the proper form for a deadlift. I was about to give up.

Then, at a recent book event for Dr. Kelly Casperson, I met Holly Rilinger, a former professional basketball player¹ from Lincoln, Nebraska who now owns and trains women to lift heavy weights at The Lifted Method. Unlike many social media stars in the weight-training space, she knew her stuff, is menopause-focused, and doesn’t peddle in snatched abs or lifted butts. She wants you to be strong in midlife—earlier, if possible—because it’s good for your health.

Rilinger’s been weightlifting since she was 13 years old, when she first got interested in a career in professional basketball. Now that she’s entering menopause herself, she knows how critical it is to lift weights to maintain bone mass in middle age. “We stop laying down new bone at age thirty. We're done,” she said. “We're not going to lay down any new bone. It doesn't mean that we can't increase our bone density, but you break a bone later in life, the recovery is far different than if you break a bone at ten.”

Yes, I told her, I know all-too-well how long it takes bones to heal at my age, having just broken my wrist in a car accident last year. But weight lifting is so boring.

“Not in my class,” she said with a wink. “Come see me. I’ll show you.”

So, at the end of last summer, intrigued by Rilinger’s promise of not-boring weight lifting geared toward women my age who are concerned with maintaining bone mass, I drove three hours out to her studio in eastern Long Island to take one of her classes in person. My partner came with me: just him and twenty menopausal women, each in our assigned spots in a semicircle surrounding Holly, with an excellent selection of music that was blasting the whole time we lifted plus two minutes of meditation at the beginning and end of class. If we liked the in-person class, she told us, we could sign up for online classes we could either attend asynchronously—she tapes them all and posts them online for her members—or live from the convenience of our own bedroom. She even has an online menopause boot camp so women all over the U.S. can train with her. (The next one starts on January 13, and she’s gifted readers of Ladyparts a discount code of MENO15 if you want to try it, and I want to be clear that I have nothing to gain here by telling you this. I’m just telling you.)

That first hour that my partner and I spent lifting far heavier weights than I’ve ever lifted in my entire life not only went by in a fun, music-pumping flash, I could definitely feel the results in my muscles for days afterward: not pain, just progress. And because I’d noted how much attention Rilinger paid to the women zooming in online from their homes as she did to the ones coming to class in person to the studio—correcting this one’s posture during a deadlift, urging that one to choose heavier weights—my partner and I signed up for her monthly online classes. (We share a subscription, which Rilinger encouraged since we do our workouts together, and this not only adds incentive for us to keep lifting, it subtracts half the price for each of us.)

“But why heavy?” I asked her. Why is it important to lift heavy weights as opposed to lighter ones, and what does that mean for bone mass?

“Every decade over forty,” she said, “all my body is doing is losing mass. So that naturally means my metabolism is starting to shut down. So what’s the best way to keep that going? It’s to build muscle. And to build muscle in any kind of metabolic adaptation, you need to be lifting over 70% of your one-rep max.”

But what about the whole building bone thing? If even the Osteoporosis Foundation doesn’t think it’s possible to build any more than 1 to 2% of bone density after menopause, why even try?

It’s all about the heaviness of the weights, Rilinger told me. Never mind the dearth of studies or the paltry sums we invest in women’s health or even that most doctors will tell their patients that it’s impossible to build bone mass after menopause. “The reason why lifting weight increases your bone density,” she said, “is because when you're lifting that heavy weight—and remember most of the magic happens in that higher weight, that 70% or more of your one-rep max—you're doing enough damage to the bone that the bone's going to come back and and repair itself.”

Still, I was dubious that lifting heavy weights three times a week would produce greater bone mass. Again, I was just hoping to maintain what I had.

But the week before Christmas, I had my second DEXA scan. And lo and behold, on Christmas day, a Christmas miracle dropped into this Jew’s inbox. Or maybe it was a Hanukah miracle, since they coincided this year, who knows? In any case, it felt like a miracle. Without any pharmaceutical intervention whatsoever, and with just three months of consistently lifting heavy weights via Rilinger’s online classes three times a week, the bone mass in my left hip has increased by a whopping 4.1%! (Please ignore the 2030 typo in the first line below from my DEXA report. My first scan was in June of 2023, not 2030. I don’t know how to travel into the future. Yet.)

My latest DEXA scan results

Yes, I still have osteoporosis, according to WHO classification, but as one active octogenarian who’s still in excellent shape and continues to work and tour as a professional choreographer recently joked with me, “I mean, who doesn’t?”

Anyway, I know I’m just one woman, and this is just anecdotal evidence from three months of heavy lifting. But it’s enough evidence for me that I will keep doing Rilinger’s routines—which are, indeed, not only not boring but actually fun enough that I look forward to doing them—for as long as I’m able.

Yes, I have gained ten pounds since I’ve started to lift heavy weights, but my clothes still fit the same as they always did if not better, so this gain—for the first time in my weight-conscious life—doesn’t concern me. Muscle weighs more than fat, and I can tell that the gain is all muscle. Plus BMI measurements using only weight and height as their sole criteria are bullshit anyway. We and our doctors should all just toss our scales in the trash and get one of those InBody H30s².

Rilinger, too, has seen a sea change in the past couple of years from women fearing weight gain and/or bulking up with weights, or only lifting weights as a means to look good externally, to women—especially middle-aged women—actively seeking out strength for the sake of strength. “Women are, for the first time in my life,” she said, “finally open to it. Like women are literally coming in and saying, ‘I just want to be strong.’”

1. These are the teams for whom Rilinger played pro ball: Taranka Sparx in New Plymouth New Zealand; Oberhausen, Germany; Berlin, Germany; Istres, France; Phoenix Mercury

2. Holly gifted readers of Ladyparts a discount code for this, too. I’m actually considering buying one, if only to track my muscle-building progress. That code is LIFTED.