The Sweet Spot Is Progressive Challenge Without Stupidity

Image: A woman with dark curly hair, wearing full gym kit, lifts a barbell with composure. The rooster is just here for the atmosphere.

I have a few gym buddies. We are only buddies in the gym, that is, we say hello, keep largely to ourselves, and every now and then float a conversation during a rest between sets. One of these buddies offered up a view recently that it’s simply ego that compels one to lift as heavy as one possibly can. His position was that the ego driving (mostly) men to lift incomprehensible amounts is not anchored in anything other than vanity and strutting that the gym produces with remarkable and predictable reliability.

I wasn't entirely sure he was right, about the heavy bit, not the strutting bit. As I’m currently refining our strength foundation module, I thought I’d look into this a little further.

Feeling my aging muscles atrophy by the second (I swear my glutes have diminished by half this year alone and I had a genuinely respectable Greek girl butt to begin with) the "use it or lose it principle" is a huge motivation that keeps me nudging those weights up as much as I can. The biological case for this is not vanity, though vanity is my dominant reason to go to the gym and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.

Sarcopenia is the other reason I choose to lift. This is a fancy word for progressive loss of muscle mass from our late thirties that gains considerable speed around perimenopause. It is another inconvenient fact of being a woman in a body that is reorganising itself post childbirth years. The good news is that resistance training is one of the most evidence-backed interventions we have against it. The less good news is that the gym is a space where we are often being led by the wrong principles.

Let's get clear on how muscles work

Muscle grows in response to mechanical stress applied over time, a principle called time under tension. The key word here is time, not speed, or number of plates on a bar. A muscle held under meaningful stress for long enough receives a clear signal to adapt and grow. Move the weight too fast and you remove the very tension the muscle needs. Add more weight than the framework can support and you are tearing rather than building something.

I've tried to think of an analogy and here's one from nature. The island of Lanzarote is shaped by volcanic pressure over millions of years creating something of singular beauty. There is no hurry here, also no maximum pressure, which would probably have annihilated the island. Just the right amount of pressure, applied patiently and repeatedly. Your muscle builds the same way. It has no idea how much weight you are lifting or what you think of yourself while you are doing it. It is just responding to meaningful stress applied with sufficient duration. If you think about it, our muscles are just nature responding to the same principles that created beautiful volcanic islands.

What this means for women specifically

Here I default to exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist Stacy Sims, who has spent her career making the case that women's bodies are not the equivalent of that of a small man. Sims has proven that the 10 to 12 reps that work for men's muscles don't work for ladies in perimenopause. For us the formula is 4 to 6 repetitions, heavy enough that you can't lift beyond that range, and do that 3 to 5 times, recovering completely in between. It is fewer reps, a progressive amount of load and more rest. Not what we've been told right? It's the time under tension that does the work building muscle that volume or pace can't do.

If the solution is so simple why don’t more women do it? The answer is an industry that prescribed training protocols of heavy lifting for men but gave women the step class and the 2kg dumbbells. We absorbed that framework so completely that we vainly follow it into the years when it actively works against us. At precisely the time our bodies need us to lift heavy, rest properly and build real strength, the system we were handed is still pointing us toward the treadmill. Our ego has been manipulated by an industry that told us we were better off leaner, lighter and smaller, not strong and powerful, and at fifty we are stupidly listening to it.

Challenge ourselves, but let's not be stupid about it

So I kind of agree with my gym buddy that vanity is an entirely legitimate reason to pick up a weight and nobody should be ashamed of it. The problem begins when it gets in our way, when we use vanity to perform strength rather than build it. We do this at work too, and with identical consequences. The ego that loads the bar past what the body can absorb is the same ego that attends a conference with a 38.5-degree fever because your boss told you that you could sleep on the ferry there and back, and you want to show that you can hack it.

This is not a criticism of effort. Effort is the whole point. What matters is what we direct it toward and why, and for that I have drawn from the work of Viktor Frankl, who thought about these questions from circumstances considerably grimmer than a gym floor or an annual board meeting.

Frankl made the observation that suffering without meaning is corrosive, while suffering directed toward something that matters makes you stronger. Attending a conference with a 38.5-degree fever just to be seen is not heroic. It is damaging your body, your mind, and your health long term for an audience that will have forgotten you were there by the evening's drinks, during which time you are sleeping on a ferry again. Lifting a challenging amount of weight to support muscle growth as you age, on the other hand, is directed toward your most healthy 70-year-old self. When the ego is driving, as it was on that ferry, you are not building strength, you are suffering for a shitty boss while dismantling the very architecture that creates it. Why you do something determines how it affects you, and in the gym as in the boardroom, the why turns out to matter enormously.

What is strength for?

The gym and the boardroom run on some very misguided operating systems, and women in particular have to be wary of the manual they are following in both environments. The ego, left to its own devices, is not particularly strategic and it's not our best guide for determining how we look at strength, it's just very loud. It is also small, focused entirely inward, on appearance, on performance, on how much is on the bar, on whether you are seen to be coping.

Frankl understood that the point of becoming stronger was never to be impressive. It was to be free enough, capable enough, and well enough to direct your energy outward toward something of essence. For the gym that means training not for vanity but to keep the body capable and robust for a long life. For work it means building the kind of sustained strength that lets you contribute something real rather than just survive the week. The purpose of strength is not simply to be strong. It is to be strong in ways that allow us to live well and have something left to contribute beyond ourselves, which is probably quite a different place from where most of us have been.

As for the roosters at the gym, their ego is at least pointed in the right direction. They just need to slow down, load sensibly, and rest properly. Which is advice that applies rather more broadly than the weights floor.