There’s a gang of health problems that tend to develop in middle age. A study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for instance, found that 78.4 percent of American adults say they suffer from one or more of the following:

Heart disease, elevated blood pressure, high cholesterol, arthritis, cancer, type 2 diabetes, and obesity.

It’s safe to say no one wants to be a part of that 78.4 percent, as well as that you naturally experience muscle loss as you progress through middle age. The usual rate is between 3 to 8 percent per decade unless you take specific measures, like lifting weights, to lessen it.

But most people don’t. The latest CDC survey brought to light that just over 80 percent of American adults do little or no resistance training. Which means that about the time most people exit their middle years and enter their golden ones, a new health problem, sarcopenia — the loss of muscle, muscle strength, and muscle function to the point where it creates disability — has joined their personal gang of health problems.

So who’s the leader of these dangerous gangs? Dr. Gabrielle Lyon believes it’s the fact that so many people do so little to mitigate muscle loss in middle age.

Lyon tells Dr. Thaïs Aliabadi and Mary Alice Haney during a SHE MD podcast “many metabolic and age-related problems are fundamentally muscle problems.” As a result, she has coined the term “muscle-centric medicine” and created an online practice that offers just that in the form of personalized lifestyle, nutrition, exercise, and health counseling to make the biggest organ in your body as robust as possible.

While becoming a virtual patient of Lyon’s would certainly help accomplish this, there’s another way to exert control over your muscle according to a study published in the September 2025 issue of the American College of Sports Medicine. Perform weight training two times a week for 30 minutes.

To start the study, researchers recruited 42 healthy men and women who had lifted a bit but had never been hardcore and had them weight train two times a week for 30 minutes for eight weeks. During each session, the participants performed a single set of nine different exercises for eight to 12 repetitions with a two-minute recovery in between.

Eight of the exercises required machines: front lat pull-downs, seated cable rows, machine shoulder presses, machine chest presses, cable triceps pushdowns, supinated Smith squats, plate-loaded leg presses, and machine leg extensions. Dumbbells were used for biceps curls.

Half of the participants did each set to failure, meaning the set ended when doing another repetition in good form was impossible. The other half, however, finished each set with “reps in reserve.”

They were instructed to stop each effort about two reps shy of failure.

Two months later, the researchers took measurements of the participants’ upper arms and thighs and compared them with ones they had taken at the study’s start. They found those who had trained to failure had gained more muscle size than those who didn’t.

No shocker there, although the average difference between the two groups was “generally modest.” The shocker is that the increases in strength and muscular endurance between the two groups were “similar.”

Both findings are significant because of a point Lyon makes on the SHE MD podcast. That many women would love to be stronger, but don’t weight train because they don’t want to add too much muscle size.

Relatedly, in a Huberman Labs podcast featuring Lyon and focused on improving muscle health, host Andrew Huberman states that regardless of gender the end goal for most who lift weights is not increased muscle size but strength and muscular endurance. Which means another statement Lyon makes on the SHE MD podcast is apropos for everybody who’s not a dedicated bodybuilder.

“We need to redefine what resistance training is,” that it’s really nothing more “than simply moving the body with force.” A force that provides “progressive stimulus,” and it’s this stimulus “that matters more than whether you lift heavy or light.”

To prove that last statement is true, here’s a challenge for you. Do the first half of a single squat repetition without using any additional weight.

Sounds easy, huh? After all, all you need to do is lower your butt enough so that your upper leg is parallel to the floor, but there’s more to it than that. Now brace your entire back against a wall, take a deep breath, and get mentally prepared for the real test.

Lift your stronger leg off the ground while keeping your position in tact. See how long you can hold it there.

My guess is that in less than one minute you’ll be feeling a burn in the quadriceps similar to the one a dedicated bodybuilder feels at the end of a 15-to-25 rep squat set. You’ll also be giving the quads the sort of stimulus they need to function optimally, thereby lessening the likelihood that any of those aforementioned “gang members” will hassle you.

One important final note: Don’t attempt the final part of the challenge, the lifting of the stronger leg, if you have even the slightest inkling that doing so could lead to injury.