The internet is arguing about “heavy” vs “medium” lifting. I think it’s missing the point.
This week, author Jo Moseley joined us for a Nature Moves class. I met Jo a few years ago and I’m always struck by her energy for life and trying new things. If you haven’t read about her paddleboard adventures, you can do so here.
We got chatting in the café afterwards about the current social media debate on whether we should be lifting “heavy” or “medium” weights for bone density and strength.
I’ve been trying to put my finger on why I find this debate so frustrating for a while, and a few things clicked into place over coffee. So I thought I’d write them down and ask what you think. Then I thought, actually, Andrew and I should probably record some thoughts on the podcast too. Let us know what you think.
Anyway, here goes…
At the moment, in social media land, some people are very firmly in the “you need to lift heavy” camp and others are in the “moderately heavy is enough” camp. I understand where the arguments come from and which research informs them but if you’re someone who hasn’t started strength training yet, this debate is not helping you at all.
For someone already comfortable in gym culture, a debate about percentages, loading thresholds and one-rep maxes might feel useful, or at least interesting. But for someone who has never lifted before, everything feels heavy.
If you’re new to strength training, you’re not deciding between “heavy” and “medium.” You’re trying to get your head around which movements are a good match for you, whether you’re doing it “right” or “wrong,” how to navigate your osteopenia, menopause, pain history or lack of confidence.
Into that already very noisy space, social media adds another layer of confusion.
Should I do this programme because it says “lift heavy”?
Should I avoid that one because it only says “moderate”?
Am I wasting my time if I’m not at 80 or 85% of something I’ve never even measured?
I don’t think this is a particularly constructive conversation.
Why are most of us strength training in the first place?
Yes, bone density and muscle mass matters but the bigger reason, for most people, is capability.
You want to be able to do what life requires of you without overthinking it.
You want to be able to lift the plant pot from the front garden to the back garden. You want to be able to move the awkward bag of compost. You want to be able to get a suitcase into the car. You want to be able to help someone up. You want to carry shopping, wrangle furniture, pick up a sleeping child, haul a wheelbarrow, or deal with whatever practical task turns up on a Tuesday afternoon.
You become more capable, less fragile, less hesitant, and more able to meet the physical demands of life.
And once you frame it like that, some of the internet bickering starts to look a bit silly.
Part of the problem, I think, is what Andrew and I often call “gym logic.” Gym logic is useful up to a point. It helps people quantify progress, it gives structure, it can be a very good bridge into training. We use it ourselves in some contexts.
But it can also skew the conversation away from the real world. It becomes very easy to forget that most people do not experience life as a series of barbell calculations or microprogressions, we experience life through tasks that need to be completed. And I sometimes think the strength world does a poor job of telling people that getting stronger is meaningful because it expands their options in the real world.
Social media makes this worse as it tends to reward clear, simplified, oppositional messaging. Nuance does not travel especially well. “It depends” is rarely as clickable as “you must do this.”
As accounts get bigger, there is a tendency for people to dig in. A message that may have started as one useful perspective becomes a rigid position and once you’ve built a brand around being the person who says X, it can become very hard to soften, update or broaden that position even when new evidence arrives or context changes.
So we end up with loud camps arguing over relatively narrow differences, while the people who most need help are left more baffled than before.
For complete beginners, a lot of this debate is premature. When someone first starts strength training, they do not need to worry about whether they are training at exactly the right percentage of their one-rep max - they need time, consistency and reassurance.
They need to learn the movements to feel what it is like to hinge, squat, press, carry, pull and get up and down with confidence.
They need to realise that they are allowed to take up space in this world of strength and to discover that what feels frightening or alien at first can become normal.
Often, the progress people make in the first few months is not because they have suddenly transformed their body in some dramatic way. It is because they have become more coordinated, more confident and more familiar with effort. They stop fighting themselves and they begin to trust that they can do it.
The other day our seven-year-old picked up an 8kg kettlebell and push pressed it overhead. To be clear, we do not “train” our children in any formal sense - in case you had images of some sort of bootcamp for children… They just move, play, climb, hang around the gym shed, and occasionally copy what they see. What struck me was not that he did it, it was how little drama there was around it. There was no internal monologue about whether he was the sort of person who could do that movement - he just approached the task as a task. How freeing!
Children rarely have the baggage around self-belief that many of us, particularly women, carry into strength, especially if we are starting strength training in our 40s, 50s or 60s. By then, the barriers are not only physical, they are social, psychological and cultural too. A heady mix of deeply embedded fears about injury and beliefs that we are not capable.
I know this because I see it often in new members, but it wasn’t very long ago that I had to fight those voices in my head too.
So what do I think?
The public conversation around strength training can become oddly detached from the lived experience of beginners.
If all our messaging focuses on whether people should lift “heavy” or “medium,” we risk missing a more important message - for many people, the real breakthrough is getting started at all, discovering that strength is for them, and realising that becoming more capable changes how they move through life.
That feels like a much more useful place to begin.
These are early thoughts rather than a finished argument, and I’d be genuinely interested in what you think.
A few questions:
Is the “heavy vs medium” conversation actually useful for beginners, or mostly useful for people already inside gym culture?
Are we doing enough to communicate strength training in terms of capability rather than just protocol?
What helps people most in the first six months: precision, reassurance, coaching, consistency, community?
How do we talk about bone health and progressive overload without creating more fear and confusion?
