09/03/2026
Okay this is important for all of us women over 60 (and likely men and everyone else too, they just don’t have the data). More evidence that we need regular, consistent resistance training for improved health outcomes. In this case supervised strength training 3 times a week over 2 years greatly improved one marker of heart health.
An ageing heart does not fail all at once. It thickens, its chambers stretch, and it fills more slowly, years before anything shows up as a symptom. A two-year trial in older women watched that process run in one group and reverse in the other.
Rodrigues and colleagues (Med Sci Sports Exerc 2026) randomized 64 physically independent women aged 60 and over to either two years of supervised weight training, three sessions a week of eight whole-body exercises for three sets of 8 to 12 repetitions, or to no training. An echocardiographer who did not know which group anyone belonged to scanned every heart at the start and again two years later.
The mechanism is plausible from what lifting does elsewhere. Resistance training lowers resting blood pressure, which reduces the load the left ventricle pushes against on every beat, and a ventricle under less load has less reason to thicken or to compensate by enlarging. The trial did not test that pathway directly, so the explanation is inference rather than measurement.
The untrained group's hearts changed the way ageing hearts do. Over two years their left ventricular wall thickened by 7 to 14 percent depending on the site, the ventricle's mass rose 11 percent, its filled volume grew 20 percent, and the left atrium, the chamber that swells when the ventricle becomes hard to fill, grew 28 percent.
The speed at which the ventricle relaxed fell 19 to 23 percent and an ultrasound marker of filling pressure rose 22 percent. In the lifters every one of those measures moved the other way: walls 3 to 4 percent thinner, mass down 5.5 percent, atrium down 7 percent, relaxation 13 to 15 percent faster and filling pressure down 11 percent.
Sixty-four people at one centre is a small trial, and the measures are ultrasound readings rather than heart attacks, hospital admissions or deaths, so the trial shows structure and filling changing, not outcomes. The untrained group also changed more in two years than population studies of ageing would predict: in 5,004 adults followed by cardiac MRI, ventricular volume fell by less than one millilitre a year with age rather than rising (Cheng et al., Circ Cardiovasc Imaging 2009), so part of the control group's drift may be chance, measurement variability or an unusually inactive comparison group.
in women past 60, three supervised sessions a week for two years was enough to move wall thickness, chamber size and filling in the healthy direction while the same measures deteriorated without it. Whether fewer sessions, home training or men would show the same has not been tested.
Rodrigues et al., Med Sci Sports Exerc 2026;58(6):1288 · PMID 41572515
Cheng et al., Circ Cardiovasc Imaging 2009;2(3):191 · PMID 19808592
